


Penumbra

by hitlikehammers



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Fake/Temporary Character Death, Gen, Love, M/M, Multi, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-06
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-11-20 12:15:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/585321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When James Moriarty vows to burn a heart, he doesn’t do it by halves. When John Watson’s life hangs in the balance, Sherlock Holmes would cross timelines, end galaxies—would burn <i>worlds</i> for his family, for the man he loves.</p><p>James T. Kirk, on the other hand, ends up caught in the crossfire, facing off against a fierce adversary bent on razing the planet he calls home, which is nothing new, really.</p><p>Having the misfortune to carry the name of the man his enemy is seeking to destroy, and thus being mistaken for said asshole? That, well: that <i>is</i> a little new.</p><p> </p><p><b>Minor Trailer and Preview Spoilers for <i>Star Trek Into Darkness</i></b>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Into Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> So, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing our villain in the new Trek, and then [this trailer](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BrHlQUXFzfw) having the end-bit that it does... how was this _not_ going to happen?

Face to face, the man, this monster: he looks as formidable as he ever did on the newsfeeds, the intelligence stills. He looks terrifying, he looks maniacal.

But Jim Kirk sees something else in him, up close—something violent and wrenching and familiar in ways Jim wishes it wouldn’t be, prays that it’s not.

Because this man, this _thing_ : there’s a spark in his gaze, a sheen to his eyes that speaks of desperation, of heartbreak. And Jim knows, he _knows_ that it’s damn near futile to try and stop a man who leads with his heart.

“James.” Jim shudders at the way his name is purred, clawed out like steel stripped against itself, whining, vengeful. “Dear Jim,” and his hand goes to his phaser, his grip tightens, and he sees the motion recognized, sees it reflected in those colorless eyes like ghosts against the sclera, the whites. 

“Will you fix it for me...” There’s a sing-song quality wrapped tight the harshness, a mocking that elevates the tone to hysteria, insanity, and Jim feels a shiver of real fear shoot down his spine as he presses tighter to the ground, vulnerable, sprawled beneath his towering foe.

“No one left to fix it any longer, Jim,” comes the snarl, the hate, and there’s a contortion to those sharp features that looks unnatural, that teeters on that perilous ledge between rage and devastation, undecided, unsure. “Just you and me, now.”

“I’m not who you think I am,” Jim insists, does his best to keep his voice steady.

“Oh, you are _exactly_ who I think you are.” Something dangerous flashes behind those eyes, something powerful and wrathful, the likes of which Jim hasn’t yet seen, hasn’t encountered and sought to subdue. “And you _always_ have been.” 

Jim can’t help the cry he lets loose, startled from his throat as his opponent, his target drops to his knees, straddles Jim at the thighs and pins him bodily at the chest with his palms. 

“A spider, with a web far more vast than I’d ever dreamt,” and hands, those hands holding him down come in near, come in dangerously close to Jim’s collarbones, his neck. 

“But you have to know,” and now the fingers are stretching, now the pressure is building, and Jim tries for one last gasp to hold except it’s vague, gasping, thin. 

“I will tear this planet to shreds,” he hisses, vile in Jim’s face as his throat contracts for the squeezing, the bruising and the crushing that’s coming down from all sides, a grip so unforgiving, so uniformly-aimed at destruction. “I will collapse this timeline, this universe, whatever it is you’ve created, whatever you’ve spawned, I will _end_ it. Do you understand?”

And Jim does, yes, as his vision starts to dim. He understands that whatever Starfleet wanted, whatever kind of agreement, whatever sort of ceasefire they’d desired, none of it will come, it’s a fool’s errand, all of it. Because this man, this _man_ —

Jim fears that there’s no stopping _this_.

“You’ve tried to take him from me,” and it’s broken, beneath the surface, when he speaks now, when Jim hears it; “so many times,” and Jim’s mesmerized, Jim’s fixated on the way something trembles, something shakes in his adversary's neck, convulses harder, more uncontrolled than Jim’s own throat as it closes in, collapses. 

“You’ve done your worst,” the murderer, the sufferer above him forces out, rough, eyes gleaming; “but you have to realize, you _must_ realize,” and Jim’s losing focus, losing breath and the shape of his lungs, and it _burns_ —

“You have to _know_ that in trying to burn my heart, you woke a tiger, you set the sun loose,” and Jim tries to swallow, can’t, won’t, and if there’s a dampness to the words, if there’s a droplet of something warm and wet against his cheek that’s not from his own eyes, then it makes sense, it makes no sense at all, and Jim’s heart is pounding hard, a barrage against the choking, the ending, but not enough, not enough to be desperate in the moment against a desperation that spans _lightyears_ , ends worlds.

“And it’s _you_ who will burn, now, Jim,” so soft, so livid against his ear. “Only you.”

And Jim aches as the black takes hold; aches for more than just the bruises, the breaks in his bones as the world, the smoke, and the feeling fades out.


	2. Below Deck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My thanks to my dearest [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad/), and my captain [sangueuk](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sangueuk/) for encouraging the continuation of this plotline, and for taking a look at the text that came about.

Truth be told, Jim’d had a weird feeling about this guy from the get-go.

They’d been tracking him ever since he hit the edge of Federation space, ever since he became a potential threat to them and theirs. Jim scoured every record he could find, had tracked him through a tenuous association with the rebels responsible for the recent incursion on Khitomer, a solid sighting on Neural after more than half its population had been wiped out, minor crimes on Ajilon Prime, but the timeline seemed spotty, too much missing. Either way, from what Jim _could_ see, while he was rarely the one getting his hands dirty, this high-collared man of mystery seemed to be brains behind the bloodshed: significant collateral damage, survivors reporting questioning techniques bordering, but never quite crossing the line into torture, and then, nothing.

 _Nothing_. 

There’d been speculation of blood feuds, political vendettas, prejudicial hate crimes, but no solid evidence. The attacks were calculated, and vicious, but quick—coded, each planned and significant. And the bastard himself, he was like a shadow he was utterly unknown: his origin, his lineage, nothing.

He was _no one_ , and that was telling: he was smart, shrewd; showed a pattern, had a plan. He was looking for something. That much was clear.

And whatever it was, it was here. He thought it was _here_.

Hence the scale of the attack he’d planned, the warbirds—stolen, from what they could tell, giving away little of the man's sympathies, his affiliations; not many of them, true, but heavily armed, and each of them waiting to strike until the Enterprise intervened; they'd disappeared now, without their leader—mercenary pilots, then, no doubt—but the havoc they could have wreaked: it wasn’t an invasion he’d been planning.

This was about destruction. This was grasping, this was lashing out blind in hopes of hitting home in the process.

This had scorched earth written all over it.

But Jim, well, Jim had a hunch. Jim had spent hours studying the stills, the image caps from the feeds, and there was something he recognized in the face, in the narrowing of the eyes and the fire caught inside them when the man showed his face, when their prey was caught on screen: he saw panic, violence, loss—the prismatic shards from a glass heart, a fragile heart, when it shudders and shakes free, when it’s caught and held and made warm beyond reason; when after all that it get dropped, that heart, and it cuts, and fuck all, it’s not for a lack of wanting, it’s for a lack of strength, a lack of _life_ in the palms, in the wrists that were trusted, that kindled the warmth, that made the world work right.

Jim saw it in Spock, when Vulcan was lost. Again when Nyota nearly died. 

He saw it in the mirror when the diagnosis came down, when the prognosis came back: when there was only a year, maybe less, left for them, left for _him_.

He saw it every morning before they came through with the cure.

So there’s more to this, Jim knows. There’s more to this villain than violence and rage.

It’s just...you just can’t hate this hard without some heart backing you. It just—you _can’t_.

So when the doors to the brig slide open, Jim’s looking for what’s out of place, searching for the human side of a monster. He’s looking for the source of all the hate inside the empty space, the hole that gets left in the losing.

Beyond the forcefield, the man’s hair hangs limp from where his head is bowed, propped between his knees where he rests his elbows. Jim knows the position well, himself, and schools his face of latent sympathy when the prisoner looks up, makes eye contact—the eyes are different, now, and yet the same: soft, but still broken, and Jim can’t make this man an enemy in his mind, can’t place him in the opposition without reservations, just can’t. He’s not sure why.

It should scare him, but it doesn’t. Jim’s always been able to read people, and he’s not about to start second-guessing it now.

“I would defend my actions,” the man speaks out, tone subdued yet still steady, self-assured; “but I was blinded. I did not see, let alone observe.” He blinks at Jim, eyes scanning him with impossible speed, flickering briefly to Bones, sizing up the two of them individually, as a whole: taking in more than Jim wants to dwell upon. 

“You are not the man I thought you were,” the prisoner declares, blinks, sucks in a sharp breath. “Though that man is here,” he adds, murmurs almost to himself; “he _must_ be here.”

“You realize that your actions could have killed thousands,” Jim states, voice hard.

“Yet they did not,” the prisoner counters, unconcerned. “You saw to that.”

“Had Earth been engaged—”

“It wasn’t,” the man cuts in, “despite my efforts.”

Jim tries to swallow his misgivings, steels against a vile taste from his gut but he can’t, because they’re absent, not even there for all the signs that they should be. “You’re remorseless.”

“I,” the man licks his lips, tosses his hair from his eyes and sighs, the fear and the longing in him naked for an instant before they disappear, and it’s those that stick with Jim, that lodge in his chest and hold. 

“I miscalculated,” and when he says that, when he _admits_ that, Jim is fairly damned certain that it sounds like the end of the world.

“You’ll stand trial for violation of the Federation Judicial Code,” Jim edges, looks to provoke a response.

“I violated no code,” the prisoner throws back, almost bored. “The destruction that took place outside of your jurisdiction is for the Imperial Empire to prosecute, as they will.” Something flashes in those dusk-grey eyes, and Jim, for all that he shouldn’t, finds it exciting. “I am not a member of your Federation. I will not be intimidated by your petty rules.”

Jim shakes his head, fights a smirk—the fight in this guy, he has to hand it to him. “Your intentions were—”

“Clear? Perhaps, in your opinion.” The derision in that tone bites, but Jim’s not deterred, because he knows it. He’s used it. It’s a mechanism rooted in truth, and it works, and for all that Jim’s immune, he sure as hell appreciates a good show of it. “I gave no indication of my plans, and my actions, whatever they may have been, were thwarted.” The prisoner shoots him a grin, almost pitying, lamenting his assumed stupidity. “I think you’ll find little evidence to hold against me, Mister Kirk.” 

“Captain.” The correction is sharp. Jim doesn’t take well to being thought a fool. He knows they’ve got little to nothing in the way of evidence against this guy, knows that crossing into Federation Space without formal charges brought against him meant that the Klingons would likely target this man’s accomplices, and let the ringleader himself traipse off to cause mayhem in other Quadrants—typical—but so it stood. Had they any _real_ dirt on this asshole, they’d be en route to rendezvous with Starfleet Command so that he’d serve time for his actions.

“Captain? Now that’s interesting.” Their prisoner perks at whatever connections he’s drawing with that revelation, but it doesn’t last. “Regardless, _Captain_ , you’ll have very little evidence to support your accusations, I fear. Aside from assault,” he grins, this time less condescending and more genuinely entertained, and Jim flashes for an instant back to that bar in Iowa, and swallows the phantom taste of beer and blood on the back of his tongue; “which I will gladly plead to, should the occasion arise.” 

Jim says nothing for a long stretch of second; he knows the man’s watching him, and knows Bones is behind him, ready to interject, and it’s just moments before he knows Bones will spit something caustic at the bastard when the man speaks, and Jim’s pretty fucking sure he does it because he read the tells, the indications that things would go south if Bones opened his mouth.

Interesting.

“You find me intriguing,” the man states, and Jim’s thrown for a moment; he wasn’t expecting that. “Why?”

“I—” Jim blinks, isn’t sure how to answer, isn’t sure of the truth, even, whether it should or shouldn’t be shared.

“Don’t deny it,” the man shakes his head, flips his hands dismissively. “I can read it in your posture, in the coloration of your eyes.” And Jim, for all that it makes very little sense, believes it.

Isn’t sure why. He’s just sure that he does.

“You’re a monster,” Bones cuts in, snarls just a bit below the honey of his accent.

“Am I?” their prisoner asks, half-hateful, half-giddy. “Some of worlds we brought to waste were enemies of yours,” and it’s true, they were. “I’ve read your history, and of my own will, I’ve done nothing your own people haven’t also done when duly prompted,” his eyes dart between Jim and Bones, collectively implicating them both, their kind; “when cleared to act as they wished.”

“I’d heard stories about you,” he continues now, eyes fixed only on Jim, addressing him alone. “That’s why I thought you were the man whom I seek. Dangerous, reckless, proud,” his smile turns icy, cruel; “cunning, even. Left a race to rot in a black hole in the name of vengeance,” and Jim swallows, because, yes. Yes.

Not unprovoked. Not without cause. Not with any other option.

But yes.

“I cannot say that I approve of what I have become, Captain,” their prisoner continues, and his eyes are haunted, breathing shallow, heavy, labored as he looks away, studies his hands. “I can’t say that I relish the blood on my hands,” and Jim can see that he’s hurting, more the physical, more than anyone can help; “but I will not apologize for it.” His eyes raise up, snap back to Jim’s where they tell a new story, open at new fissures and bleed truths that Jim can’t judge so quickly, that a man who’s seen loathing like James Tiberius Kirk has seen it can’t condemn, not yet, not without the facts, and the feeling. 

“I will take none of it back,” the man declares, a confession; a promise. “If it brings me one step closer to my prey, one breath, the inhale alone,” his voice breaks again, like it did when he’d choked Jim within an inch of oblivion, “then it will have been well worth the lives.”

“You’re inhuman,” Bones hisses, taken aback. Jim just stares, studies the face of the man as he takes in the words.

“A machine,” and he laughs, bitter, but looks sad. “If only,” and his voice is almost gone, and Jim, he can _read_ people, and this man is not a threat. Not anymore.

“Jim, leave this parasite to rot,” Bones nudges his shoulder and moves to turn, leave, and maybe Jim moves to follow, maybe not: he can’t tell either way, really, before the question is asked.

“Have you ever loved, Captain Kirk?”

Jim turns his full body to face the prisoner, meets his eyes full-on. “Excuse me?”

“Are you, or have you ever been, in love?”

“And what would you know of it, you devil?” Bones shoots back, on his way to livid. Choking always puts him on edge, Jim’s learned. “You’ve taken the lives of innocents, you’ve—”

“I have,” Jim answers, silencing Bones with a raised palm behind him. “I am,” he swallows, doesn’t break gaze with the man he should hate and can’t, the man he shouldn’t answer, but does. “I do love.”

“And what would you not do for that love?” the prisoner asks, something strung and trilling shrilly in the question. “Is there _anything_ you would not do,” the man continues, and Jim marvels for the way he falls apart in seconds, the slow-motion-too-fast shattering of a being, of a heart and a head and a whole; “for your _family_?”

Jim says nothing. 

Jim understands the man in front of him more than he’s comfortable admitting, more than he thinks he can stand. 

“The man I seek vengeance upon is a demon, a criminal, a fiend,” his low voice starts to climb in pitch, starts to speed, his composure begins to slip as his eyes spark fire, mayhem, chaos. “And he has placed my captain, my doctor, my friend, my, my _world_ ,” he swallows hard, and Jim feels himself want to follow suit, feels his throat closing because he knows this, he _knows_ this, and it can’t be just a coincidence, it can’t be.

There’s no such thing as coincidence. 

“He has placed the only thing that matters just a whisper, a gasp from death,” the man continues, and Jim remembers, Jim remembers Bones before the treatment, Jim remembers his chest feeling too small and too fragile, and it’s all written in this man’s eyes, it’s in his face, his _skin_.

“No one knows what ails him,” the man forces out, frantic now, his breathing rapid, his eyes too wide. “But the condition, it’s,” he bites his lip, steels himself, gathers his wits and meets Jim’s eyes with resolve, with purpose, with certainty.

It’s _profound_.

“It’s unknown, but not unfamiliar, it’s too similar to polycythaemia for there to be no connection, but the treatments have failed, all of them, but the mutations are advanced, they could only be—”

“Xenopolycythemia,” Bones interjects, his expression stoic, but Jim can read the set of his spine, the tension there, the unease.

“You think,” Jim starts, feeling cold at just the memory.

“Mmm,” Bones hums, and Jim tries to let himself feel secure in the way Bones breathes next to him, healthy, _living_ ; tries to take heart at the way the man imprisoned in front of him brightens at the mention, the possibility of hope.

“You know it?” Fuck he even _sounds_ hopeful, like a kid in a goddamned candy shop.

“It’s the red blood cells?” Bones asks, reluctant, but a healer at his core.

“Yes, they multiply without relent,” and there’s something strained in his tone, helpless, and Jim remembers that feeling, deep in his veins.

“I know it. Had it, in fact,” Bones nods, folds his arms across his chest. “Contracted it not too long ago,” and when Bones shrugs, like it’s nothing, Jim wants to fucking deck him, he really does. 

“It’s easily cured, with the right treatment,” Bones carries on, steps forward, something loosening in his stance, his demeanor. “How long has he...”

“Three months,” the prisoner answers, immediate, then pauses, calculates in his head, “and I’ve been here...” he trails off, his eyes going blank.

“Our intelligence picked up your entrance into Federation space seventy-two hours ago,” Jim supplies, his eyebrow quirked in askance.

“I’ve been,” the man marvels; “is it strange, I don’t know where I’ve been?” 

And Jim can see in the emptiness, the way his eyes focus on something unreal, unseen, that it’s nothing but fact. So Jim just asks the obvious question.

“Who are you?”

“The coloring of your uniforms,” the man’s eyes narrow; "it corresponds to speciality, does it not?”

“You’d know,” Bones scoffs, on guard again, nods at the telltale arrowhead on their prisoner’s shirt. “You—”

“I stole these clothes,” he confesses, stoic, factual. “I didn’t know what the insignia meant, only that it was common, and that the place where my target was said to be displayed it in abundance.”

“You said the mutations were too advanced,” Jim jumps in, changes tactics, because things are starting to come together, answers are beginning to coalesce and he’s not sure he likes the conclusions he’s coming to, and fuck, but he’s pretty sure he’s right, too; he’s usually right, goddamnit. “Too advanced for _what_?”

The man blinks, sits stock-still.

“What is the,” he coughs, awkward, grimacing and swallowing something hard, something distasteful; “what is the stardate?”

He says it like it doesn’t fit in his mouth, like it sticks to his tongue. He says it with assurance, but it’s uncomfortable. He doesn’t own it.

Oh, _fuck_.

“2262,” Jim answers, and asks one more time: “Who _are_ you?”

The man takes a deep breath, and there’s something about him that changes, a mask that falls, and he’s mortal, he’s hurting, he’s a _man_. 

_Christ_.

“My name is Sherlock Holmes,” comes the answer. “And I’m from the year two thousand fifteen.”

Silence reigns, for a few long moments, and fuck _all_ , but Jim just _had_ to be _right_.

“Computer,” Bones’ voice breaks through; “get me sickbay.”

“Doctor McCoy,” the answer rings through the room, the long corridors. 

“Get a tricorder to the brig, Christine. Stat.”

“You believe me,” this man, this Sherlock Holmes says, doesn’t ask.

“I _don’t_ believe you,” Bones shoots back, “but we can run enough scans on you to make it so we’ve got something more solid than my belief,” Bones’ lips press tight together, a thin white line; “or lack thereof.” 

“You’re a doctor,” Sherlock muses, then looks back to Jim. “A captain and a doctor.” He seems to mull it over a moment, the gears whirring visibly behind his irises. “How intriguing,” he proclaims, eventually. “How like my,” and his voice breaks just before the rest of him, comes out soft and scared: “ _John_.”

They let that name, that heartache echo for a long minute, and that’s all Jim needs to commit to the decision he already made.

“Secure comm to Commander Spock,” Jim dictates, the hard line of his voice louder than it should be, than it needs to be. “Hold communications with Starfleet Command regarding mission status until further notice.” With a nod to himself, forgoing a second glance at his captive, Jim turns on his heel and makes to leave.

“What are you doing, Jim?” Bones asks, tone low, right on Jim’s heels, too close, close enough to lean forward and touch when Jim spins around just inside the lift, smirk wild, wicked.

“What I’m always doing, Bones,” he answers, eyes glinting with mischief, with a fierceness and resolve; “going with my gut.”


	3. Through Memory

“A ship full of soothsayers,” Sherlock Holmes scoffs when the suggestion’s made. “Pity the small-minded future, indeed.”

“Well,” Jim reasons, unsure if this is such a good idea. He’s never sure if it’s a good idea, not when he’s the target; it’s even more of a question when it’s someone else, someone who has no idea what they’re in for, but, seriously—“if you’re so convinced we’re too moronic for even your simplest account of the facts...” Jim trails off, shrugs, and is saved from any further commentary when Bones bursts back in, grinning devilishly, a quirked-browed Spock in tow.

“Here we are,” Bones announces, sounding far too pleased, just this side of giddy; so very unlike _Bones_. Dangerous. “Smartest bastard aboard the _Enterprise_ —”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, Doctor,” Spock replies, unbidden, and Bones sees fit to scowl.

“Can it, pointy-ears,” Bones growls, turning back to their prisoner. “You really think we won’t understand what you say, Mr. Pre-Warp? Well, you won’t have to say a damn thing to Commander Spock, here.”

“You understand what will transpire?” Spock asks Sherlock, tone even, but his expression is guarded, hesitant; Jim knows he dislikes melding when he can avoid it, particularly with minds he doesn’t know.

“I’ve been told you’re here to read my thoughts,” Sherlock announces, all false-amazement and heavy critique. “You’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical.”

Spock nods. “I will witness your memories,” he explains. “I will read the events as they occurred in your experience, and I will relay them to the Captain to corroborate or contradict your account. I will not tamper with your memories, and I will touch nothing of your mind outside of your recollections.” He pauses, waits for the gravity of what is to come to sink in, even though it won’t, Jim knows. It _can’t_. “You consent to this?”

“Oh please,” Sherlock deadpans, eyes wide with mocking; “work your strange magic.”

Jim feels a diving, a roiling in his gut because there’s something in him that knows, _knows_ that the man in front of him wouldn’t be so flippant, would make every attempt to articulate with his words, to explain regardless of how imbecilic he thought them—Jim has a hunch this man would do _anything_ to keep someone else out of his mind. 

There’s nothing for it, though. The man’s an arrogant prick, for whatever else he might be, and it’s too late, anyway. Spock’s hands are poised, pressing; there’s a jolt between them both: their eyes close.

There’s no going back.

______________________________

 

It never fails to baffle Jim, how little time it takes, objectively, outside of the meld, not when it seems to last a lifetime or more when it's his mind, when he’s a Vulcan and a human, the galaxy and the atoms of the Iowan soil all at once. He winces in sympathy as he watches this Sherlock Holmes snap back to the present, as he watches Spock step back, clasping his hands behind his back and studying the specimen before him, both faces unreadable, though Spock’s frown is too pronounced, and Sherlock looks very pale, his pupils a tad too wide.

“That is,” Sherlock swallows, blinks, “unfathomably invasive.”

Bones snorts. “More than your corner tarot reader, eh?”

Sherlock ignores him, staring Spock straight in the eye, unwavering. Unnerving.

“Never do that again,” he says coolly, the consonants crisp, sharp. “Never.”

“As you wish,” Spock nods. “I apologize if you experienced unanticipated discomfort. It is difficult to prepare for the extent of the transference, the depth of the connection, without having experienced it.”

Sherlock’s jaw works for an instant, almost imperceptible. “Quite.”

Spock turns slowly toward Jim, seemingly undecided, unsure.

“He is not from this time, that is true,” Spock confirms. “He is not an immediate threat,” Jim dwells on the _immediate_ , and the implications buried there. “His story is more layered than you know.” 

Jim’s expecting the hesitant extension of Spock’s hand toward him, too high for a handshake. Doesn't mean he likes seeing it any better, for knowing that it’s coming.

“If you’re agreeable, Captain.”

“Of course he’s not agreeable,” Bones cuts in, his face scrunched with the same distaste he reserves for peaches, non-Terran whiskey, and most things having to do with Spock. Particularly mind-melding. 

Jim can’t help but look at him with some bastard cross between amusement and affection. “It’s not _natural_ , Jim,” Bones tries to appeal to him, as he always does, but Jim brushes him off. He hates it, perhaps more than Bones does, but it’s a necessary evil. 

“Let’s get this over with, then,” Jim shrugs and approaches Spock, steels himself for the touch, and then the immersion, the descent, the way one consciousness supersedes another.

And then he sees it, the memories that belong to another. Blue eyes closing. Lips.

And then he feels the emotions, not his own. He feels, he _feels_ —

Oh, fuck. 

______________________________  
______________________________

 

They’re kissing, just kissing, and Sherlock finds kissing to be incredibly interesting, the absolute antithesis of dull; he finds the shape of John’s mouth and the taste of his tongue and the texture of his lips, the lines of his teeth—it’s a wealth of knowledge, revelations waiting to be discovered, reclaimed. 

When John’s eyelids flutter closed, Sherlock fights a grin. When the pulse in his lips flutters wickedly, his feels his own chest warm pleasantly, full of promise. When John’s mouth goes slack, Sherlock draws a breath in to plunge deeper.

When John’s knees give out, and he starts to fall, Sherlock’s heart seizes, his blood stalls for a moment as his eyes fly open, as his arms reach to catch John, to clutch him in the moment it takes for his eyes to refocus, for his muscles to bear his weight once more.

“John,” Sherlock exhales, his eyes wide as he watches the colour return to John’s skin, but he’s red now, too red as he gasps for air, and it’s disconcerting, it’s concerning, it’s—

It’s terrifying, when John meets Sherlock’s eyes, and there’s an instant of confusion, of genuine uncertainty in his unflappable doctor, in his steadfast soldier. 

“M’fine,” John recovers himself, smiles wanly, tries to reassure, but Sherlock’s grip on him tightens, instinctual. “Just dizzy for a minute,” he shrugs it off, blinks too lazily, still unmoored, and Sherlock’s pulse is heavy at the base of his neck when John tries to laugh: “You’re something else, aren’t you, making me go weak at the knees.”

Sherlock swallows uncomfortably, because John’s laugh sounds wrong; refuses to look into those watery, washed-out eyes as he steers John to his chair.

“Sit,” Sherlock commands, runs a hand through John’s hair, but his voice is soft, rough, and he hates it, he _hates_ it. “I’ll make tea.”

______________________________

He loves John’s wrinkles, knows them intimately, has catalogued their locations, their lengths, their depths, the fanciful shapes they might make in one’s imagination when strung together, when transposed into sketch-marks on paper.

Sherlock _loves_ John’s wrinkles. So he knows when there are too many of them, when new ones fold in too quickly, too freely, too full, like fractures in the earth of him, the whole of them both.

He _knows_.

______________________________

It’s been three weeks since the dizziness, two and a half since Sherlock started counting John’s wrinkles, finding new ones every morning. It’s been three weeks since Sherlock had watched the sun rise without a twisting in his torso, a sinking he couldn’t explain.

It’s been almost a month since they’d taken their last case, since they’d been able to; since John started sleeping and greying and maybe it was just time catching up, maybe Sherlock ached more than he used to, maybe he was merely willing away the evidence in his own face, his own bones.

But then John had crumbled in front of him; then John had fallen to the floor, clutching his chest with a hand that look too withered, too frail, so _old_ and Sherlock’s always thought he’d known fear and conquered it, that he’d erased that weakness from his psyche, his hard drive purged, he’d always believed himself above fear.

Except then John falls. Except then John _falls_ , palm to the centre of his chest, and Sherlock’s never known fear before that moment. 

Not once.

There are a number of words that follow. Words that don’t fit.

 _Myocardial infarction_.

“That’s not possible.”

 _Atherosclerosis_.

“John’s arteries are perfectly healthy.”

 _Elevated haematocrit_.

“No, that’s, no.”

_It was a close call, Mr. Holmes. A very close call indeed._

“It doesn’t make any _sense_.”

His throat feels small, his ribs too big, and there’s so much emptiness as he sits near John’s bed, as he takes John’s hand and traces the veins, follows the lines, the tubing, and no, no, no.

It makes no _sense_.

It takes him most of the night to process, to recognise that it’s been a month since the last murder, and weeks between the symptoms and this breaking, this blow, it’s not much time at all, really.

But it’s been five years, five months, and five days, _precisely_ , since James Moriarty last darkened their doorway, since the pool, since John in semtex and the end of a smaller world, a lesser world, when John was his friend and not yet half of his heart, and five, five, five.

Four murder-suicides, that first night, that first moment, the first time Sherlock had thought on what _home_ could feel like, and he’d been a fool, they’d all been fools to think they’d lost him, buried him, that he’d disappeared for good that shadow, that demon, that monster in the shadow-dark.

Sherlock’s blood boils, just as it begs to run cold.

______________________________

It takes him too long to reconcile the timelines, but it makes sense, it makes _sense_ , it’s absolutely _crystalline_ as soon as the text arrives:

_Take your time, Prince Charming. Snow White isn’t going to wake._

And Sherlock can feel the blood drain from his veins, pool in his gut and curdle, turn sick in his stomach as he goes to the cupboard where John keeps the tea, looks for the reason the flat smells of countrysides and fresh bakery—nauseating now, where it had teetered on pleasant: a gift from that elderly woman, the case of the missing wedding ring, not particularly valuable except for the sentiment. It had been John who’d persuaded him, though, who’d lectured him with such softness, with such deft fingers in Sherlock’s hair, that _saving lives is admirable enough, but sometimes Sherlock, you’ve got to stop and save the hearts, as well_ and oh, John, his John, he was the hero that day, and the gift was not unearned, and he tries to think of the woman, tries to observe in retrospect whether she was suspicious, or simply oblivious like so many, like too many, and—

There. The gift of tea. So innocent. Merely flavoured leaves.

**Ripe-Red Apple Pie.**

But fairytales so rarely have happy endings.

His mobile vibrates in his palm, and he shivers before he dares to look.

_Ready to play?_

______________________________

The tampering is obvious immediately upon analysation: Sherlock would be willing to call the molecular structure itself almost menacing, if he were prone to bouts of anthropomorphism. 

He isn’t, of course. His blogger, though, certainly is. And if Sherlock compares the tea with the erythrocyte-laden sample taken straight from John’s veins—John, his _John_ —he sees it, coming together, twisting in his stomach and pressing on his lungs as he grips tight to the ledge of the countertop, knuckles trembling, wrists quaking until he snaps, until he breaks, until he knows not what he sees, cannot recognise the demon he’s facing except to know that it bears teeth, serrated, venomous, and he’s helpless, for all of his resources, he matched against the unknowable for all that he knows, and when John asks him, trembling, shivering, weak and nothing like himself, nothing like the soul that Sherlock knows, that proved to Sherlock that there was such a thing in this universe as a soul because John’s was too bright, too bold to deny and stay sane; when John asks him—

“What’s happening to me, Sherlock?”

—and now there’s an answer with no answer, there’s a reason with no solution to balance the equation out; he _snaps_ , and his forearm aches, bleeds for the way he swipes the microscope to the floor, and he breathes without feeling, he blinks without seeing.

And when John asks, when he _asks_ , Sherlock swallows the bile, exhales slow, warm against John’s thinning hair, his wrinkled, weathered brow, and if John can feel the pounding of his heart he says nothing as Sherlock’s eyes slip closed: 

“I don’t know,” he tells his John, a failure like lead in his bones. “But I will find it,” Sherlock vows; “I promise you, I will find him, and I will solve this, and I will fix you, John Watson. I will save you if it’s the last thing I live to do.”

And when John falls asleep, so tired, so weak; when he drifts off before Sherlock can finish and his breaths are laboured, tenuous, each one a gamble on a future without guarantee, but John was always fond of a risk and Sherlock’s grateful, so grateful for each of John’s breaths as Sherlock chokes on his own, shudders it out just shy of a sob:

“John.”

Sherlock mouths it against the rough of John’s skin and screws his eyes against the unfathomable sting, the flood that’s raging behind the lids:

“Oh, John.”

______________________________

When the text comes, it’s not a clue. It’s a summons.

_51.746027°N, 1.256542°W. The universe is universally ironic._

Sherlock kisses John on the forehead, on the lips. He holds John to his chest for a moment, cradles John’s head just below his chin and holds, _holds_ , because he doesn’t know what’s coming, he doesn’t know what’s waiting, and if he gets nothing else, oh, he _needs_ John to know what he means.

Needs John to know that for all the words he cannot say, because they don’t fit, and he needs them to _fit_ , but for all of the atoms in the spiralling cosmos, he needs John to know that he’s _loved_.

 _Always_.

______________________________

The bridge makes sense. Folly Bridge. Sherlock can close his eyes and envision it on the inhale: the good reverend and those children, his voice rumbling, his imagination spinning webs and ropes and ribbons, insubstantial, incredible, insane.

The water barely moves, so still. Too still. 

Down the rabbithole, indeed.

His mobile chimes, a text, but he doesn’t have to look at it. He knows what it says.

_I owe you a fall._

He jumps.

He falls.  
______________________________

It takes him fifty-seven hours to accurately ascertain where he is, the name of the place, the general tenor of the culture. 

That disturbs him more than anything, really. More than the unfamiliar composition of the atmosphere, the way it feels too thin in his lungs; more than the way his skin looks sickly under the strange glow of double-suns. More than the fact that there _are two suns_.

Fifty-seven hours is far too long.

His landing, his arrival, his coming takes place upon a rock called Krios Prime. From his first dance with illicits, he’s learned to wake in uncertain circumstances with nothing short of practiced bewilderment, nothing more than partial consciousness of his surroundings, his lot. 

They know he isn’t one of them, the gaggle of natives who find him, but while they are suspicious of him from the outset, they don’t seem inclined to do him further physical harm. And so Sherlock does what he does better than most.

He permits the masses to continue their moronic drudgeries, and he primes his senses to observe and dissect everything they forget gives them away.

They speak to him in a foreign tongue, at first: nothing he’s ever heard, demanding the same thing as he feigns a drifting, in and out of clarity: _Tuuvat aat! Tuuvat aat!_ He uses what he knows of linguistics to pick apart the pieces of their conversations, the repetitive phrases, the morphology, the syntax, anomalies as proper nouns, and he pieces together some meaning, but nothing certain.

They relax when it’s clear he’s no spy—not merely a spy, but a particular kind, a Klingon; an enemy. They settle further once they’re sure that he’s no Retellian. Nonsense words, and yet, the etymology, the structure of the terms, the context: markers of association. 

He sees a strange face on a screen through the slits he allows his eyes to open to as he exaggerates a moan: ridged brow, inhuman. 

Markers of more than association, then. Species? 

One of his rescuers, his captors, one of them at least is a warrior; Sherlock is able to parse with relative accuracy—he thinks—the words they use for the tall male; they refer to him as formerly of the Sovereign Guard. Monarchical government, so royal police, perhaps.

Former, though. Overthrown, perhaps. One of their hated Retellians, then? Or worse, perhaps, a Klingon? 

They’re outcasts, rebels maybe; they’re in hiding, and they’re armed, but everything is sparse, quickly gathered and easily relocated. Transient. They have little by way of provisions. They’re rogues. 

And that, _that_ is what Sherlock latches to. He listens, and he formulates.

It’s not until a woman enters the tent, crouches down near his head on the ground, that he hears the first words that make sense.

“You’re not afraid, even though you know not where you are.”

The words are English, and clear, and sensical. Sherlock doesn’t bother to halt his eyes from sliding down, his gaze form narrowing. The female hovering over him brushes her hair from her face, revealing the spots running her jawline. Uncanny.

“You are human.”

Species, then, was the correct assumption.

“Yes,” he croaks, and he tries to read as much as he can from her, tries to see everything, tries to focus and yet can’t, not close enough, not nearly _enough_ , and he feels distinctly as if the tables have been turned, as if he is the one being dissected, unveiled. 

“You can feel me.” She seems surprised. “Feeling you.”

“I can,” Sherlock swallows. “I can see it in the movement of your eyes. You’re processing immense amounts of information. I don’t know how.”

And that’s more disconcerting than he’s willing to admit.

“Empathy,” she tells him, and her tone is intrigued. “Not quite telepathic, but a sense of you. You are uncertain, but undaunted. You have been listening, inferring, though you know not what you’ve heard.”

“You’re perceptive.”

“I’ve been trained to be.” Her voice is laden with whatever past she carries, her mouth a thin line.

“I am Denina,” she offers. “I am part of the Uprising. I know that you are not a threat. Though if you are a friend, I cannot tell.”

“I could be,” Sherlock assures her, propping himself to sitting, looking her in the eye. “In fact, I rather believe I could be exactly what you’re looking for.”

Her brow furrows. “What are we looking for?”

Sherlock grins tightly. “A general who can win your war.”

______________________________

 

It takes weeks, _weeks_ to gain their trust. They send him quickly on supply runs into dangerous territory—a testament to their desperation, that they don’t kill him outright. It’s proof of their indifference to his fate, that they throw him to their Klingon occupiers without so much as a backward glance.

But Sherlock Holmes is cunning. Sherlock Holmes is shrewd. Sherlock Holmes is brilliant.

And Sherlock Holmes is more desperate than any one of them, than all of them combined.

It takes him saving the life of their leader, Ravinon, the former First Monarch of the Sovereign Dynasty of Krios Prime when Krios Prime stood free—he risks everything on the weight he attributes to the observation that loyalty, that _fealty_ is everything to these Kriosians, and it’s worth everything, _everything_ : the burns in his skin and the way it hurts to breathe, it is _worth_ it because these people are driven, but their leaders are politicians, and their one representative of the former Sovereign Guard lacks nothing in fortitude, and everything in experience.

Sherlock, though. 

Sherlock fears only one thing in the universe, and that is a universe that lives on without his best friend in it.

He takes the circumstances before him and moulds them to his ends. He organises, he mobilises, his researches without relent. There is a part of him—no small part, to be honest, but largely irrelevant in the moment, regardless of its size; but there is a part of him that relishes the advancement of technology, the ready availability of knowledge, and wishes he could revel in it under different circumstances.

There is a larger part of him, however, that laments the fact that it’s apparently taken two and a half centuries to progress only _this_ far, and with the collective innovation of the galaxy, presumably, at their disposal.

The largest part of him, of course—and he’d never have guessed it, never have thought it possible in any place or time or form: the largest part of him is thinking of John, and when his chest clenches, when his breathing catches, his eyes only scan faster, his mind only works harder.

Ceaseless.

Sherlock promises their planet back, he promises a Krios Prime for the Kriosians; they ask what he demands in exchange.

It’s Denina who vouches for him, in the end; who speaks the name of Garuth, which sharpens their stares; speaks of a love that rends empires, which brightens their eyes.

Sherlock doesn’t know why, but he sees their belief in him solidify, and he doesn’t question it. He almost feels remorse at using these people, these brave aliens he barely knows, who are willing to die for him so soon, too late—who thirst for freedom so strongly that they’ll sell their souls.

He feels remorse.

Almost.

______________________________

And so when the clues come—and they come, only after, because James Moriarty loves a show, James Moriarty needs a spectacle, and it’s only entertaining when his pawns have a fighting chance to take the king; when they come, Sherlock follows the clues. 

And his rebels—the lot of them, cobbled together from races someone has wronged, left bitter: festering wounds, all of them, waiting for pressure, waiting to for release, waiting for a reason, a cause to draw up and seize—his rebels follow him, blindly. The heart of him sneers, weeps at their desperation, their unwillingness to _think_ and _do_ for themselves, but he doesn’t allow himself to dwell. They are a means to an end, his end: the only end that bears weight. 

The _only_ end.

So he follows crumbs, risks his life against an angry Teer for a Capellan blossom—inferred from the phrase _Beauty’s Beast_ as it was sent via an antiquated subspace network to Prince Charming—that he uses to barter for entrance to the sacred paths of Boreth, where his quarry, a repentant scientist looking to escape Gre'thor, can say no words before the massacre begins, bloodshed everywhere, hundreds of innocent pilgrims slaughtered, three of his own lost to the flames. 

He stands trial on Narendra III to infiltrate Rura Penthe in search of a lead, an elderly thief with suspicious connections who knows where to find the dilithium he needs, that Moriarty needs; he confesses to deceiving the masses, of bartering faithlessly—knows the crimes he did not commit from a text of simply _What big teeth you have!_. He barely escapes when the prisoners break out, when half of the Klingons’ great prison is turned loose—he gets his information this time, though, and makes it to Elas to pillage their reserves. 

He keeps as low a profile as possible, covering tracks as he goes, igniting sirillium gas in the Azure Nebula, disappearing after he searches Khitomer for an engineer named Raxor— _Butchers, Bakers..._ —only to be blamed for the death of thousands by Romulan hands. He hides among actinides in the Ikalian belt, licking his own wounds, nursing his own pride after the disaster on Neural, where he holds the poisoned Kahn-ut-tu, the one contact thus far who could help _him_ , may have been able to save John rather than merely appease Moriarty and further those treacherous pieces on a foreign field of play— _Three wishes, don’t waste_ : when the Mugatos attack, relentless, he tries to administer the mahko root, hopes to harness it, hopes it might help his lover in kind, but it’s futile. Everyone dies.

 _Everyone_ dies. The Klingon Empire still rules Krios Prime. The rebels will turn to dust on a foreign land, too far from home.

He is where he’d started. Hopeless. Helpless. Useless. Lethal. To everyone. To his own self. To his own heart.

He’s drinking something foul on Ajilon Prime, running his hard drive to whirring, to failure as he stalls, as he falters, and he asks for another and keeps his head down, tries to will away this world, this nightmare, the inevitability that the world will end because John’s breath will cease. He tries.

Through the haze of alcohol, of hate and grief, he hears it.

An upstart. A miscreant. A parasite, a plague: the worst kind of vile being, causing mayhem. Wreaking havoc. 

“Oh, that Jim’s gonna get his,” the Cardassian spits—Sherlock’s sure, he’s nearly sure that’s what the being is, and oh, there is too much in this place, this universe for anything to ever be boring, and oh, but of course, this is what he’d find when none of it mattered, when he ceased to care at all—“fucking bastard.”

Jim. _Jim_.

_Please, can you fix it for me..._

His pulse picks up as he hears more, learns more: location, associations, weaknesses. Earth. Enterprise. Pride. People. Sentiment. UFP.

He’s learned enough about this place, this vast and dark universe, the galaxy of spite and cold: he’s heard enough about the Federation to know the stakes.

He breathes out long, low, and finishes his drink in a single gulp, almost smiles as he walks out, a plan already taking shape behind his eyes, despite the risks.

It’s worth it. It will all be worth it.

 _John_ is worth it.

 

______________________________

 

He is properly armed. He has the element of surprise. He is outnumbered, but that’s never stopped him before.

Not once.

When he descends upon them, the team sent to ascertain the threat after he’d made his presence known, after he’d orchestrated the reports and woven a thread connecting him to the atrocities, to the chaos and destruction that had followed him, that Moriarty had led him into to sully his name, to frustrate his mind and dash his hope—we he descends upon them, he is ready to become the monster they make him out to be, enemy number one of an interplanetary conglomerate. He is ready.

He will burn them _all_.

This Jim, though, this James; he looks so different, too different, but art of disguise is one Sherlock knows well, and it’s possible, it’s absolutely possible, and he will strike, he will choke, he will kill, and John, John will be saved, John will be avenged, John will—

______________________________  
______________________________

Jim’s breathless when Spock’s mind rips away from him, more sudden than he’s used to, the break tearing something vital, leaving something far too raw. He’s breathless, and his chest aches, and he knows his eyes are wild, his lungs are tight and he can only just breathe; he knows it when Bones swears low and spares neither glare nor vitriol in Spock’s direction as he comes to Jim’s side, steadies Jim’s body and takes his pulse at the neck. He studies Jim’s pupils, Bones’ gaze stretched deep and wide, lips parted and he looks like the man in Jim’s memories, looks like Sherlock Holmes watching John Watson fall ill and flirt with death: Bones looks sick and anxious and determined and that’s all Jim can see, in front of him now and in his memories of those moments not his own, of the heartache he can empathize with too strongly, too truly. 

He draws in a shivering breath and meets eyes that he recognizes, eyes that shift like mercury and gleam like a sorrow that doesn’t know how to die: Jim crosses gazes with Sherlock and feels the rise in him of something familiar and foreign, feels the resonance that had colored every bit of the thoughts Spock had shared, the feelings that stole his breath and tore at his skin, thrummed in his blood; Jim feels it, and he knows that he’s in deep, that he’ll have to see whatever this is through because it cuts too deep, hits too close to home, is too dear in his own veins to turn from, to deny.

Because oh fuck, he feels it, stronger than he thinks he can stand: not doubled, not twice what he’s used to, twice what he’s always thought he was built to hold; he feels it clearer and truer, brighter and more dangerous, more desperate than he thinks he can stand—he sees it in those dull-silver eyes and he hears it in the pump of his own heart, reads it in the set of his prisoner’s shoulders, shakes with it, knows he’ll do anything to save it; he _feels_ it, like a tidal wave, like all things, like black holes and supernovas and cheating death, like the roar of the Vette and the stars shining brighter with a hand at your chest, with lips at your neck and body heat against your back as you breathe.

He feels _love_ , whole and heavy, and there’s nothing more than that, nothing more in the whole goddamned universe.

Jim grabs Bones’ hand and squeezes, eyes sliding closed, and he nods to himself, to his lover, to Sherlock Holmes; to the shitstorm that will descend from all sides when he decides to aid and abet a fugitive, because the fingers tangled in his own are warm and strong but Jim remembers how cold, how frail that grasp had been once, too recently, too hopeless—he remembers all too well.

 _Love_.

No turning back, now.


	4. Around Table

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, my gratitude to the amazing [sangueuk](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sangueuk/) for looking this over and beating it into shape.

“So it’s not just the xenopolycythemia.” 

Because that’s the part that Jim keeps sticking on, that he keeps coming back to, regardless of everything else, all the other, admittedly-significant issues at work. Spock’s done most of the talking, the explaining, and Jim’s glad for it. He’s in no shape to focus, in no mood to relive the images that are burned into his memory, neon behind his eyes with every blink; the way his own heart had seized when that other doctor, that other savior and rock clutched his chest and fell, the way he felt physically ill now just _thinking_ about it, and he can be forgiven, he thinks, for tuning Spock out entirely, letting his recounting of the situation bleed wholly into the background as he studies Sherlock Holmes, sitting quietly, lightyears away. 

They’re gathered here, dissecting this man’s inner thoughts, and even Jim finds it unsavory, finds it unsettling, but Sherlock’s just sitting there, pale, swallowing hard, too often, chest rising and falling tightly.

Jim just has to close his eyes for an instant to remember the burn, the delightful thrill of those lips on Sherlock’s mouth, the shape of that hand, the peaks of those knuckles under thinning, aging skin, the feel of that pulse at a wrinkling, withering wrist—Jim can _taste_ John Watson if he tries hard enough, and it kills him, it _kills_ him, because damnit, god _damnit_ , Jim knows what that pressure feels like, squeezing in around a chest; what it’s like to never feel rested, less than whole before your other half gets lost and fuck, but it’s Bones all over again, in his mind, and it shouldn’t be, it has no right to be, these people are strangers, they mean nothing, in the grander scheme.

And yet, when Jim swallows, tries to fight the dryness in his mouth, the tightness in his throat, it’s his own world crumbling, his heart breaking all over again.

So Jim speaks first, because he can’t bring himself to weather what might fill the sudden quiet if he decided to bite his tongue; isn’t prepared to meet Bones’ disapproval, the shadow in Spock’s eyes, the way the meld’s lingering with him longer than it should, heavier than any of them had expected. He doesn’t have it in him to meet Uhura’s needling for the go-ahead to alert Command, or Chekov asking for a course, Sulu wondering why this deviant—guilty or no—is with them here in the ready room instead of locked safely in the brig.

He _can’t_ , because he can’t blink fast enough to keep the view of John Watson wasting away in a hospital bed from lining up with the look of Bones in sickbay, stretched on a biobed at the worst of times; in _their_ bed, exhausted, the bruises under his eyes like a valley, so fucking dark and deep—he can’t help but resonate with the desperation, the helplessness that had bled so keenly, so strongly through the meld even through its second distillation, he can’t bear to dwell on what Spock must have felt, what Sherlock’s sitting there mired in, consumed with, stewing, helpless; Jim knows it. It’s as familiar to him now as his own heart, his own mind, as known as the lines of Bones’ palm when their hands fit together, the sound of Bones’ breathing when he sleeps.

Sherlock Holmes is no stranger—he’s Jim Kirk, through and through.

“Symptomatically, no,” Spock confirms Jim’s suspicions. “He exhibits classic indicators of xenopolycythemia, but not solely. There are a number of incongruencies, particularly—”

“It looks like the viral Hutchinson–Gilford’s that’s broken out at London Children’s,” Bones cuts in, tone sharp, low, and Jim fixes his gaze quickly on his lover, reading the tightness of his jaw, the reluctance, the inner struggle between adding anything to the conversation that might benefit the man he still viewed as a threat, and his ingrained, thrice-damned instinct to _help_ , regardless of who needs it. 

“That’d explain the physical aging, the hair loss,” Bones glances at Sherlock, whose eyes have gone wide as he nods frantically, desperate, just this side of unhinged; it’s heavy in Jim’s stomach, it’s bleak.

“The progeric atherosclerosis coupled with excessive blood clotting from the XPCV could have easily caused the heart attack, particularly if he had no preexisting conditions, no indicators.” Again, Bones glares in Sherlock’s direction, but the man little heeds the venom in those eyes.

“None,” Sherlock answer, his voice rough and Jim winces as he watches Sherlock’s Adam’s apple bob, almost shudder with the force of the way he chokes a little, swallows wrong; “not before all this.”

“Right,” Jim clears his throat, steels himself, shakes off the past and the future and focuses on the _now_ with the kind of dogged determination that’s only skin deep until it seeps in, until it calms the blood in his veins and lets him be, lets him _do_. “So it’s both, then?”

“Could be,” Bones shrugs, but his eyes are sad, bleak. “But Jim,” he lowers his voice and leans closer, narrows Jim’s field of reference to only them, mutes the rest of the room, the rest of the crew to a blur, insignificant for just a blink, maybe two. “Jim, they don’t have a cure for what they’re seeing in London. It’s been eight months already, and they’re no better off than when they started.”

“But they’ve been looking,” Sherlock cuts in, something achingly hopeful lacing his tone, and Jim feels the plunging in his stomach as he sees the same sickening light in the man’s pale eyes. “There’s research, there’s data, there’s information, evidence,” Sherlock’s focus shifts, then, as he retreats inside his own mind within the space of a blink: his gaze clouds and he folds his hands beneath his chin, his fingers tapping tip to tip, frenetic. “They’ll have eliminated the obvious, discounted thousands, perhaps millions of possibilities...”

“So what,” Bones scoffs, “you think a fresh pair of eyes is just what they need?”

“It’s a case,” Sherlock’s lips purse and his eyes widen as he breathes in deep, shuddering, steadying; clutches his hands against the edge of the table in front of him, too damned tight. “I can solve cases.”

“You’re a good couple centuries out of practice.”

“Give me twelve hours,” Sherlock states it, simple: a given, and Jim doesn’t like the way that he’s not questioning it, not really—the way he finds himself believing, so quickly, so surely, that Sherlock Holmes only needs twelve hours to assimilate the advances of science and technology, of culture and medicine, governance and defense. 

Twelve hours. If that.

Bones snorts. “That long?” he sneers, baits; Sherlock merely blinks.

“Unfortunately, I can sustain optimal mental functioning without REM sleep for ninety-four hours, no more.” He glances at the computer display embedded in the keypad near the door. “As it’s been nearly a week since I’ve properly slept, I’ll require a full eight hours before returning to the work.”

“Of course,” Bones huffs, and Jim can’t help the swell of fondness in him, despite everything, at the roll of Bones’ eyes, so typical, so _him_.

“Assuming that you could make heads or tails of the century’s most unsolvable medical mystery,” Jim interrupts, “how do you plan to get back to John?” 

Yeah, right, so. Cards on the table. Jim knows his priorities in this fight, no sense in keeping them quiet.

“Moriarty,” Sherlock growls the name, venomous. “He crossed timelines, he lured me here,” and Jim’s already starting to relish the way Sherlock’s mind works, visible, behind his eyes—it’s goddamn _fascinating_ , following the trains of thought from the outside, like a map. “He needs something, _wants_ something. He doesn’t care to play without the thrill of the chase, the potential of being caught.”

Jim nods. “No fun showing off to yourself.”

“He relishes the challenge.” Sherlock confirms. “If I don’t find him quickly enough, he’ll emerge.”

“We’ve run extensive searches for James Moriarty, Captain,” Chekov interjects, eyeing Sherlock warily. “There have been no living matches relevant to our criteria.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Bones drawls, . 

“He’s here,” Sherlock shoots back, eyes bright. “I _know_ he is here.”

“Well, I’m sure as hell glad you _know_ ,” Bones volleys, standing from his seat; Jim won’t pretend he doesn’t lose himself for a split second in the lengthening of that body, it’s lines, the unfurling of muscles and Bones stretches his legs and starts to pace slowly, deliberate; “but that doesn’t do us a damn bit of good—”

“The frailty of genius is that it requires an audience. He will turn up, I will _find_ him,” Sherlock hisses, almost snarls, “and in the meantime, I intend to find a cure for this condition.”

“Oh, because you’re a doctor too, I’m sure,” Bones shakes his head, laughing humorlessly. “Or do you plan on picking medicine up through osmosis during your catnap?”

Sherlock’s gaze narrows, sharpens. “Chemist, in fact.”

“So you’re just gonna stroll on in and solve the medical mystery of the decade, where _actual_ experts in the field have been grasping at straws for the better part of a year?”

Sherlock’s expression hardens. “That happens to be my speciality, unraveling the problems that so-called _experts_ are too dim to solve, so yes. I intend to do precisely that. Viral progeria, you said?” Sherlock turns to Jim. “I presume you have a lab on board.”

“This is insane.” It’s Sulu, this time, who voices the sentiment.

“How the hell do you even know this Moriarty is real? How do you know he hasn’t cooked up this crock of bullshit to clear his name after he’s killed thousands?” Bones demands, face indignant, fueled perhaps by what he reads as injustice, expect it’s not. It’s so far from that, and the trouble is Jim doesn’t have a clue how to make that clear, doesn’t know how to take Bones by the shoulders and scream loud enough that if Bones loves Jim half as much as Jim loves him back he’d shut up, and he’d help this man, this anomalous being outside his own time but with a heart that’s hurt so goddamned bad that Jim can see it, feel it, taste the bile of it hot in the back of his throat. Because he remembers: he remembers when his chest ached every time he breathed because Bones couldn’t walk, or eat, or grasp his hand. 

Because if Bones could understand that, if Bones could _see_ , then he would damn well stop questioning Jim, he’d recognize that every moment they spend arguing is a moment they just don’t have and he’d help, he’d help them fix this because there’s no other option, there’s nothing else for it when it’s _love_ , just, _fuck_.

“The meld was quite vivid,” Spock attests, though Uhura eyes him warily.

“Bones,” Jim jumps in, “you didn’t see...”

“His memories might have been altered,” Bones counters, “we can’t be sure.”

“Doctor McCoy,” Spock’s tone tightens, and Jim recognizes the edge lingering beneath its surface; “I can assure you that it is well within my capabilities to identify reconstructed neural patterns and tampered memories upon encountering them.”

“Moriarty is here!” Sherlock insists over Spock’s irritation, “I have played his game before and I know his tactics, I am certain—”

“Do you think I give a shit for what you’re certain about?” Bones snaps back, sharp. “For all I know, you’re a murderer, and turning you over to the Federation for sentencing would be more merciful than you deserve.” He turns, gesturing wildly. “Jim, you saw what happened on Neural. That was just shy of genocide.”

“That was an accident!” Sherlock defends.

“That wasn’t his fault,” Jim adds, and Spock nods tightly, lips thin. Because yes, Jim knew what happened on Neural, knew that there was no explanation as to why the Mugato attacked and that once the shaman died, no one could save them; Jim knew that Sherlock had been seen there, had been identified. But he had seen Sherlock’s memories, had watched him hold the Kahn-ut-tu as she breathed her last, watched him beg her to tell him how to fix it, how to help; Jim had _seen_ the way he’d struggled to use the mahko root to no avail. He’d watched how Sherlock fought.

“I _tried_ —” Sherlocks adds, an undertone of grief twisting that last word wrong.

“Shut it, you bastard!” Bones throws his weight against the table in Sherlock’s direction—futile, too much space between them, but it’s enough to put Sherlock on his feet, to spark rage in those eyes that Jim remembers, paired as it was with those hands around his throat. “Do you have any idea how much blood’s on your hands? The number of _children_ they found dead?”

“Bones, settle down—” Jim starts, voice low as Sherlock talks over him, seething.

“Moriarty—”

“You lot!” They all quiet on cue, turning as one to see Scotty standing before the closing door. “You aren’t talking about Doctor Arty, are ye?”

“Doctor Who-what?” Bones asks, face scrunched —impatient, in no mood for games, but something shifts in Spock’s expression, Jim sees it as he speaks, very slowly, in answering Bones’ question.

“Doctor Morrison...” Spock draws out, truth dawning, connections forming with each syllable: “Ivan Arty.”

“But apparently his _friends_ call him Mor,” Scotty adds, more than a bit snide—sore subject, apparently. “He’s working on some holographic interface, like we need another one of those,” Scotty scoffs, and yeah. _Sore_ fucking subject, clearly, as he grudgingly tags on: “But he’s got quite the gaggle of hangers-on, that I do know.”

“Mor I. Arty?” Sherlock asks, his face unreadable as fucking Sheliak, but Jim can see the veins in his temples, the prominent lines of his neck, the tension visible—tangible, if he could touch.

“Came outta nowhere less than a year ago,” Scotty continues, prodding at the replicator for a drink. “Londoner, works down near old Marylebone. He’s a bit off his head, from what I understand,” Scotty makes a show of licking the foam off his lip as he sips his coffee, “but what can ye do?”

Jim watches as Sherlock swallows hard before he speaks, clenching his hands into fists, eyes sparkling: “It’s him.”

Jim nods, stands: there’s only one course of action, now, he knows this, feels it in his bones—that determination finally settling in and guiding him true. “I’ll show you our labs before we get you a place to bunk down.”

“Jim, you can’t—” Bones starts, but Jim doesn’t let it go any farther, barely turns to address him as he moves to the door, motioning for Sherlock to follow.

“Bones, I’d like a word, if you’ll wait in my quarters?” He doesn’t mean to say _my_ instead of _ours_ , really; Bones’ eyes widen, and he doesn’t say another word. “Spock, you have the conn.” 

Jim leads Sherlock away with a new sense of purpose, and the door slides closed behind them with a finality that fits.

End of discussion. Full speed ahead.


	5. Beneath Breathing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As ever, my thanks to the wondrous [sangueuk](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sangueuk/) for taking a peek at this and keeping it on course. Likewise, thanks to [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad/) for plot-pinging and [speakmefair](http://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/) for saying she'd like to see this updated before I poked at my other fics—which is such a nice compliment, I can't even process it.

He’s shivering.

The landscape is dappled, dotted: white on dull taupes and browning jades. His mother’s face is dotted with water, saltless tears; her skin, her smile too warm for anything to remain frozen and it’s perfect, just right—her hair makes her older in the moment, streaked with the downy white falling from the sky as she reaches out, and she bites her lips against the sparkle in her eyes, the mischief, the promise of _always new_ and _never boring_ and _adventure, darling, ever onwards and up_ and he feels it in his chest, the pang of it.

He feels what her voice will sound like if her mouth opens, if she draws in breath, but she doesn’t.

She doesn’t.

There’s no way to decipher the billowing smoke of the chimney beyond from the flakes, the slowly-condensing specks of pure nothingness, of no value, of cold and crisp and delicate, of before and numb and crystal: latticework. Never twice the same, but snow doesn’t fall like that.

His mother doesn’t breathe, and snow simply does not fall like that.

He catches the too-perfect trajectory of a single snowflake in his mouth, aborts its completion and knows that the taste is true: soft, light, just this side of bitter, tingling in the roots of his teeth. His jaw clenches around the sensation as heat rises in him, as his heart pumps harder beneath the twist of his scarf.

Blue scarf.

“Computer,” Jim—Jim, his name is _James_ , not Doctor Arty, not “Mor,” he is James Moriarty, god _damnit_ , and these ordinary people—these _plebeians_ who fancy themselves evolved—they will know it before the end; he breathes, exhales: “end program.” 

The scene dissipates instantly, the now-familiar blackness shot through with rust-coloured bands marking boundaries where none exist, none _can exist_ , because that is the purpose, that is the plan.

His plan.

The heels of his palms dig viciously just above his cheekbones, the pressure against his eyes just this side of agony. He grabs for the PADD at his left, codes in all the things that the memory extractions just couldn’t capture, that the human brain isn’t keen enough to recall: he randomises the dancing of the snowflakes based on density and windspeed just a little bit more, removes enough of the calculability and tries to restore the wonder. He alters respiration patterns taking into account physical exertion and external temperature and yet he cannot quite shift the algorithm to predict emotion, to reflect joy and curiosity and excitement and pride the way it needs to, the way it _must_.

 _Never bored, my Jim,_ she’d always said, hands on his cheeks and her eyes like dull rivers reflecting the stars. _In this world, there’s no reason to ever be bored._

They call it the Holodeck. He thinks that’s a bit pointlessly technical, but it grows on him. He can’t very well call it what it is: his playground, his palace, his sandbox.

His sanity.

“Dr. Arty?” He doesn’t look up at the intrusion. 

“Later, my pet,” he tells her—he doesn’t know her name, but he knows that she both bristles and preens when he calls her that, and he likes the contradiction. Contradictions don’t get boring as quite so fast.

He waits until the doors slide closed before he tries again.

“Computer,” Jim calls out again, this time kinder, thoughtful. “Run Program 13121977BG.”

“Access code required.”

He clears his throat and puts on his best falsetto: “Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man: no time to talk.”

“Access granted. Loading program.”

The black fills with light around him, the orange lines melt away: perfection. 

This time he’s not in the countryside, he’s not home. The scent of the air is musky, sour even at this height. The weight in his hand is cool, the sky is grey as he awaits the arrival for this moment, this turning point, this solution to his final problem. His grand gesture. His last move. 

His fantasy.

He hears the footsteps, just as those soles would have rung out against the rooftop, just so.

_Check and mate, you beloved bastard, you._

He looks up, grins at the conjuration as he emerges, the mirage in that coat with those eyes and that hair, and he knows this will be glorious because Sherlock fucking Holmes looks almost resigned, almost beaten before the stop.

It’s snowing, ever so slightly. The flakes catch on those dark lashes, dance across those cheekbones like the lancing edge of ice where it breaks.

 _That’s_ how snowflakes fall.

_________________________________________

 

The door slides open, and the hissing of it shouldn’t make his muscles tense, but it does. 

Which is unfortunate, given how Jim’s spine tightens quick, hateful when he sees the bottle of bourbon, sees how much is already gone.

“Jesus, Bones,” Jim bites out, stripping off his uniform, leaving just the undershirt as he drops into the chair. “This isn’t a goddamn court-martial.”

The good doctor says nothing, merely pours another glass and leaves it where it stands, doesn’t nudge it closer to Jim, makes him work for it. He leans over and grabs it and does his absolute damnedest to ignore the way his partner's lips glisten with just-drying whiskey, glossy and smooth.

He’d work for those lips, too, but fuck, not now.

Not right now.

Jim lets himself swallow, lets the heat of a good few sips of the amber liquid replace the heat of arousal; he breathes deep, slow, lets his eyes drift closed for an instant before Bones snaps straight through the stillness. 

“What the hell is going on in that fool mind of yours, Jim? Because fuck if I know what in god’s name you’re thinking, here.”

Jim had walked into this, ready for these words, ready for more words, even, angrier words; he’d been prepared for a fight, so when Bones asks his question with his tone just clinging to the ledge above defeat, Jim isn’t braced for the way it squeezes in his chest, in his gut.

He takes another swallow of his drink, breathes out heavy.

“You remember when the symptoms started?” Jim asks, though he doesn’t have to. They both remember, all too well. Jim remembers the first signs, when they’d thought it was nothing—there were the headaches, there was the haziness, the way Bones swore when he couldn’t read the PADD in front of him, the way Jim had ragged him about needing Retinax. There was the itching after they’d showered, long and hot, the way Jim had stretched his lover wide and taken him time and again under the spray and his skin had flushed a red so deep Jim’d harassed him about it for days. Pruritus, at first, but then the gout took hold, so bad that Bones could barely walk. Then the ulcers, and he could hardly eat. Then the erythromelalgia set in, and he couldn’t touch for the burn of it, and it broke Jim’s heart to see it, to hear the moans his partner swallowed into keens; killed him slowly as he longed for the slide of that skin against his fingertips, under his lips.

Jim shudders now, thinking of those early days; shudders when he remembers that he’d cursed the cosmos for this, for all this, thinking that no worse could befall them.

He swallows bile now, thinking of it—the hubris of it, the naiveté. 

“I watched you at night, when you managed just those few hours of sleep, watched you and made sure all the hyposprays were timed just right, hoped they’d work like they were supposed to, that we could figure it out before it got any worse,” Jim feels his face collapse a little, but he schools it into a grimace and blinks back the sting in his eyes. 

“I thought it was a nightmare the first time you stopped breathing in our bed.” Jim swallows, doesn’t look up at the sharp inhale from his lover; studies his glass instead, the way his fingers slip against it just slightly with every moment; slip and then recover, demand purchase just to lose it, just to start the game again. “I thought it was me who’d fallen asleep.”

Jim had _prayed_ that he’d fallen asleep.

He’d tried the cardiostimulator once, twice before Christine had arrived with a team, before someone had led him aside and had ignored his shaking as he watched them rush his Bones to Sickbay. Jim doesn’t think he’ll ever reach a point when he fails to see Bone’s pale skin, his blue-tinged lips; he sleeps with his head on that warm, rising-falling chest every night their sleep schedules coincide.

“I’ve seen you,” Jim picks up, voice straining, lungs too dry. “When I come to after a close call, I’ve seen you so many times, and I never understood it, not really, not until you died in our goddamned bed,” and Jim swallows, forces himself to look Bones in the eye, to meet that gaze because he can, because it’s there to meet and he promised himself and the universe that he’d never forget, that he’d never take any of it for granted as long as Bones came back to him, as long as when Jim reached out to grab him, it _held_.

“Not until they told me what it was, what they thought it was,” Jim shakes his head and sucks in air; it’s dizzy, and he feels just a little faint, more than a little nauseated, stretched and worn all over again like he felt then, like he feels now whenever he catches Bones’ profile out the corner of his eye and it looks too fucking pale, too goddamn still. “It wasn’t until they couldn’t treat the damage to your heart, not until you were cured of the xenopolycythemia," Jim's mouth is dry, his tongue heavy as his mind forces him back to those memories, that place. "It wasn't until they started saying words like thrombosis and heart attack and terminal and _months_ , Bones, you had months at the _most_.”

And his voice cracks, and his eyes squint but can’t stop the way they leak, bleed, and Jim’s pulse is a demon at the base of his throat and it _hurts_ , almost as bad as it did in those moments, in that hell—it hurt then just a shade worse, just a hair more than it hurts now.

“Fuck, Bones,” Jim chokes, and he apologizes to the great beyond for looking away, for breaking his oath, but he can’t. He _can’t_ look just now. “ _Fuck_ , but I understood it then.”

“Jim,” Bones exhales, his voice strained, unmoored: Jim can read in his face that he hasn’t expected this, and Jim had wondered whether his lover knew how much almost losing Bones had damn near killed him, how it had changed him, how it plagued his every step to this day—the answer, it seemed, was that Bones hadn’t had a clue. “It was fine. I’m fine.” He reaches, takes Jim’s hand in his own and Jim breathes in sharp. He loves Bones’ hands and yet in this moment, so steeped in the past, the skin feels waxy, withered. His touch feels stiff, cold. Jim tries to shake it off.

He can’t.

“I know,” and Jim does. He remembers when the thrombic modulator started _working_ , thank fuck, and when Chapel let him watch the readouts after they could finally use that new toy of theirs, the myocardiocyte regenerator—that life-saver, fuck, and if Jim won’t forget the pale skin and blue lips he’ll likewise never fail to recall the way the color came back, the way Bones’ chest had heaved a _real_ breath for the first time in months and Jim had taken his pulse with seizing hands and he’d cried, he’d fucking cried when it was steady, when it was strong.

Jim doesn’t realize his cheeks are wet until Bones is before him, until he cups Jim's cheek and looks at him with the deepest, dearest kind of agony, and when Jim inhales it’s soaked up with a sob.

When Bones stares into him, leans down to him, Jim arches up and seeks and finds and takes because he needs to, because he can, because John Watson in Sherlock Holmes’ head was paler than Bones had ever been, his skin like tissue, weathered and worn and if Jim woke every morning through that time thinking he couldn’t survive it, couldn’t watch his heart slip slow into nothing, well, Jim doesn’t know how Sherlock is walking, how he’s _breathing_ , because Jim had felt need and love and desperation and he’d burned for them all before but there was something different in this, there was something leaden in this but with wings and he can’t stand idly by, he has to reach because he can, because the universe was kind to him and he needs to give, he needs to be bold and he needs to make contact and right wrongs and when Bones’ lips meet his, holy god, when they’re _warm_ —

Jim _works_ for those _lips_.


	6. Within Code

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, thank you to [sangueuk](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sangueuk/) for whipping this into shape.

John’s mouth is slick, hot on his bed-warm skin as Sherlock teeters on the very fringes of consciousness, feels his lips curling upward before he can think: innate, a learned response to John, to all that John is, to all that John makes and does.

“Good Morning,” John murmurs into his ribs, tongues at the third intercostal space and hovers, breathes across Sherlock’s nipples until they’re hard, until he moves to run the tip of his nose back and forth across the buds. 

“Mmm,” Sherlock rumbles, low in the throat as his spine arcs of its own volition, as his muscles stretch and he wakes in small but rapid shifts, moving, rolling John over so that he blankets his lover, his friend; so that he can kiss slow at John’s mouth and breathe into him: “Good indeed.”

Within a breath, though, the lips beneath Sherlock’s are different: drier, slack, the smell of antiseptic milling about in the room, from the hospital bed, enveloping John in a haze.

“You’re leaving.” And Sherlock nods, can do nothing else, cannot ignore the twist in his chest when John mouths the words, and no voice comes out.

“I know,” John manages a rustle of sound this time as his lips crack, bleed at the corners as Sherlock fumbles to get him water but John’s hand stays him, so weak, so cold. 

“It’s okay,” John breathes, lungs strained, eyes roaming around the room in sympathy, regret, relinquishing any hold he has on Sherlock, freeing him from the vows they never took, not before anyone, not in words but in actions, in touches and flesh pressed to flesh, in shared heat: not spoken, not yet, and John misunderstands entirely. 

“This,” John starts, but Sherlock cannot allow him another word, not another _sound_ because it breaks him, to think that John could ever believe that Sherlock would leave now. Would ever leave without a reason, without _John_ guiding his feet.

“No, John,” Sherlock leans down, kisses that mouth again and loves it for all that it is: loves the softness of it, the worn lines in it, too soon, new for them both. “I have to follow him,” Sherlock pulls back, stares into John and begs him to understand how that gaze that once glimmered is now washed, now dim, and Sherlock will do anything to bring the spark back to John’s eyes. 

“The game,” John nods just a bit, all he can manage; Sherlock sighs and shakes his head, takes John’s stiff hands, the veins prominent against the loose skin, the wrinkles, and brings the palms first to his mouth, and then to his chest.

“The _heart_ ,” Sherlock corrects him in a whisper, and John’s eyes widen, his hands shake as he moves to catch a tear that Sherlock didn’t notice shedding, hadn’t felt trail down.

“I’ll come back,” Sherlock promises, pressing John’s hands to him tighter like a touchstone, a talisman.“Tell me you believe me when I say that I will come back to you.” 

Sherlock bows his head, closes his eyes before he breathes: “You must hang on, you must, because I _will_ come back.”

John’s fingers twitch, make to clench but can’t for the arthritis, the effort, but Sherlock gasps out some joy in just that small motion, that little affirmation held close to his quaking heart.

“And, we’ll,” John trembles and deflates on a single word: “Sussex.”

“Oh, John,” Sherlock leans down and kisses John’s forehead; they’d spoken of retirement, of growing old together, and maybe that’s part of what hurts so badly—together. They were meant to fade _together_ , not like _this_. 

“Sussex and so much more,” Sherlock promises fiercely, draws back; brings John’s fingertips to his mouth and brushes the pads against his lower lip before demanding a promise in kind: “You’ll be here when I return?”

John’s lips quirk, his breathing is laboured, but he manages: “Always.”

Sherlock startles awake to blackness; his vision adjusts and he recognises the paneling, knows he is in space, aboard a vessel, about to dismantle the villain that has taken up residence in his partner’s body; about to eradicate this demon and reclaim the man he loves.

He sits up, and the lights begin to rise in increments, gradual. Sherlock blinks at a display near his bunk: 0600. He groans, and tries not to think too much on how his hand still seeks John’s warmth to his side, even here.

It’s the first time Sherlock has dreamt since he arrived in this place, in this time.

It’s not as comforting as it should be.

__________________________________

Jim wakes with his face pressed into his lover’s neck, their bodies aligned back-to-front and their breaths in tandem, just so. He exhales heavily, breaks the sync, and asks how long he has until alpha shift begins.

“Alpha shift begins in forty-seven minutes,” the computer answers, and his own groan is matched by the one that rumbles next to him.

“Goddamnit,” Bones snarls; he’s never been a morning person, which Jim’s never failed to find amusing as hell. 

“You’re not on until beta, you lucky bastard,” Jim smacks at his shoulder. “Stop bitching.”

“Not that it matters much,” Bones growls, flipping onto his back and flinging an arm across his eyes. “Gonna have to go see what your wormhole friend’s getting up to in the labs.” He turns, staring hard at Jim. “I won’t having him making a mess of anything, and if he so much as _thinks_ about touching my Sickbay—”

Jim cuts him off with a grin pressed tight to Bones’ mouth. “I knew you’d see my side of things.”

Bones rolls his eyes. “Sure you did,” he snarks, but he can’t quite fight a smirk as he stands, stretches, and makes for the restroom. “Dick.”

Jim chuckles. “Computer,” he asks again while Bones shuffles around; “what’s our remaining travel time for the new coordinates?”

“Approximately twelve-point-six-two hours.”

“We’re doing this, then?” Bones asks around the toothbrush hanging from his mouth.

Jim rolls over, draws himself to sitting and leans forward onto his knees. He’d given the orders from their bed the night before, fresh-fucked and strung out for all the feeling, for all the memories and the resolve and the warm, living heat of his partner tucked tight beside him. He’d made the choice in the heat of the moment.

“Yeah, we’re doing this.” 

Jim doesn’t have to think twice.

Bones rinses his mouth before heaving a sigh, leaning into the doorway and crossing his arms thoughtfully. “Would you believe it,” he starts, and Jim’s distracted for an instant by the stretch of his muscles, the shape of his bare chest; “I’ve never been to England.”

“Fuck yeah, I believe it,” Jim calls after his lover as he retreats again, stares wantonly at Bones’ bare ass. “You nearly threw up when we got on that transport the first time.”

Jim gets a hand towel in his face and a sharp “Can it!” for his observations, but he just laughs and tosses himself back on the bed, listening vaguely to Bones in the sonic, allowing himself a few extra moments’ peace before the day takes off.

Because one in their right fucking _mind_ needs forty-seven minutes to get fancied up for the bridge.  
__________________________________

Sherlock will grant them this: the lab is a marvel, in terms of its scope.

On the whole, however, he’d been rather hoping two centuries’ worth of innovation would have propelled research a bit farther than some viewscreen-equipped microscopes.

Still, it makes for a fairly non-existent learning curve, and in less than three hours he’s identified the failure of the current treatment plans for this “infectious progeria.” 

He draws in a sharp breath as the image of the cells sharpen instantaneously when he adjusts the focus.

“What?” 

Sherlock startles, finds that he’s been joined by both the telepathic first officer and the doctor who levels him with a look so sour even Sherlock knows to be offended. He draws back from the ocular lens—it’s unnecessary, he grants, given the screen that projects what he sees through the eyepiece, but some habits aren’t worth breaking just now—and answers the question.

“The LMNA doesn’t encode prelamin A,” Sherlock explains, lets John’s voice in his head lead him: _clearly, not so slow as to be offensive, Sherlock, for fuck’s sake, just talk to them like you’d talk to me, on a good day, mind, not a day where you think I’m just as much an idiot as everyone else_.

Sherlock breathes out slow, and starts again.

“It’s encoding progerin from the very start.” He points at the cellular images on the screen, traces the curve of a brightly-dyed nucleus. “The nuclei are formed normally, because the laminal structure has course-corrected, see? It’s a functional nuclear lamina, all but identical in the end structure to the normal presentation, except it’s progerin, the configuration,” he magnifies the image with what passes for an adjustment knob: a simple touch pad, activated with a tap. “The abnormal lamin A are activating cryptic splice sites from the very beginning of the process.”

He turns to stare at his unwanted guests. “You’ve been throwing rapamycin at it, but immunosuppressants won’t help you here,” he announces with more weight than necessary, more satisfaction than it warrants, tries to compensate for all he hasn’t yet discovered. “It’s not a mutation. It’s an engineered plague.”

Engineered.

“This is,” Sherlock turns again to the viewscreen, bends again over the eyepiece, studies the lines and the composition and something strikes him as familiar, something in the structure and the way it all connects.

Progeria. _Engineered_.

“Oh god.” And it clicks then. He remembers. It makes so much _sense_.

Genetic engineering had always been a pet fancy for him, and it had been _ten days_ since his last case. The child had exhibited symptoms for months, it was a clean-cut diagnosis: the sample was irrelevant, free for experimentation. Thinking back on it now, he remembers feeling just shy of giddy: he had proteins to play with, a constructive way to work through his frustration with the lack of imagination exhibited by London’s criminal underbelly, and Molly would not be around to bother him for at least three hours—she’d taken an extended lunch.

“Somehow, I don’t think you’re invoking the almighty,” a voice from outside his thought nags at him, agitated—the doctor. “Spit it out, man!”

“It was mine,” Sherlock stares at the wall in front of him, stares through it. “I was,” he swallows, but even his throat seeks to punish him, denying him air, pushing bile upward from where his stomach churns, where his heart surges to propel the hatred higher. 

“Merely idle...” he breathes, strangled; “John hates it when I’m bored, the child was progeric, and he came,” Sherlock stifles a gasp as it all falls into place, the images stored safe in John’s vault within the Palace, trailing outward: John’s arrival in the lab, the sweetness of his tongue against Sherlock’s teeth as he’d asked slyly whether Sherlock was plotting world domination in there, with his chemicals and his shifty eyes.

Sherlock had grinned, had slid a hand around John’s waist and followed him out, and left the viral-spliced genes near the biohazard bin for Molly to dispose of.

“He took them,” Sherlock concludes, because it all makes sense—the outbreak here began eight months prior, and the day at the lab fit the same timeframe. “Moriarty. He brought it here to wreak havoc.”

“Or to test it,” the doctor—McCoy, yes, his name is McCoy—offers instead, his eyes hard, and yes. Yes, that’s possible, too.

More than possible. 

“I should have _seen_ this,” Sherlock hisses between clenched teeth, denies his traitorous lungs the pleasure of gasping, of inhaling too much too fast and ruining him. He should have recognized the problem for what it was, immediately associated the disease in John’s body and in these children with his own thoughtless tinkering and yet he’d failed, he’d seen and observed nothing, he’d been useless and he was going to lose, he would lose _everything_ —

“You are blaming yourself,” the first officer—Spock—stops Sherlock’s spiralling thoughts with his calm, clipped intonations. “That is inordinately illogical. Such reasoning would be akin to blaming a forebear long-deceased for the contribution of their genetic code to the rogue actions of their offspring’s offspring.”

Sherlock looks up at the commander as Spock draws close to him, as Spock pierces him with an open, evaluating stare that somehow doesn’t judge, simply absorbs. Sherlock processes the words, the tone, what he’s learned of the race—Vulcans, fascinating humanoids; Sherlock had felt an immediate need to know more about them, to understand them more deeply, not merely for the sake of comprehending all that this Spock had seen inside his mind. 

McCoy, on the other hand, looks at the pair of them as if they’ve grown an extra head between them.

Displays of feeling, breaches of logic: oh.

This is quite unprecedented, then.

“You were emotionally compromised,” Spock speaks simply, if softly. “And you were,” the Vulcan blinks, pauses minutely before carrying on; “right, to be so.” 

Sherlock ignores the indignant, disbelieving sound that erupts them from the doctor watching behind them.

“An enemy took advantage of the situation, as often enemies do. There is nothing more sinister at work here than the fact that you lived, and it cost you, as it costs all sentient creatures,” Spock concludes, draws back, and moves toward the microscope Sherlock had left in budding despair; Sherlock himself feels compelled to follow.

“You understand how this is made,” Spock gestures to the display quadrants, to the slide magnifications and the chemical structures lit up on the screen. “You possess the tools with which to unmake it.”

The commander’s logic, Sherlock finds, is sound.

“Yes,” Sherlock answers, and settles back before the lens. He created this. He would destroy it just as surely.

Yes.

__________________________________

It’s five hours—and no small amount of progress—later that they find themselves standing on the bridge at Kirk’s request.

“You rang?” McCoy asks, and Sherlock notes the smirk the captain tries to hide. Sherlock feels himself tense to see them interact: lovers, yes, and it makes him miss John all the more.

“And you came running,” Kirk winks before sobering, turning to address Sherlock directly. “Have you gotten anywhere?

Sherlock nods tightly; he senses there’s more to this summons.

“Good, because we’ll be coming up on our destination in about two hours, now,” Kirk looks over at the navigator, the young Russian, who confirms the arrival time with a dip of his head.

“Mr. Holmes,” Kirk starts, and there’s something in his eyes when Sherlock looks, something hard and yet yielding, something aching and resolved: something that smacks just a bit too much of John, and Sherlock’s heart is pounding before the words are even out of the captain’s—not _Sherlock’s_ captain’s—mouth.

“Tell me: do you miss London?”


	7. In Theory

The Vulcan is correct, in the end.

Perhaps it was intended; perhaps it was coincidence. Regardless of the reason, Sherlock had stumbled upon an answer, a boon without recognising it, saved the data for no logical reason.

He possessed the tools of unmaking, held safe in the darkest corners of his mind; he found them again in time to perhaps salvage the worn frays of his own soul.

Viral progeria, uncontrolled and accelerated symptoms of aging. No known cure.

And _yet_.

He’d watched the Teer’s flower restore a Brother of Boreth from the brink of death to full-flushed youth, his skin taut and muscles lean where there was once feebleness, slackness, his breath deep rather than halting. Sherlock had watched time itself reverse, become undone.

There has to be _something_.

The pilot, Sulu, happens to be an amateur botanist, and while he’s none too pleased at compromising his extensive collection of exotic flora, he not only consents to the use of his prized Capellan flowers, he also volunteers his expertise in identifying the specific sources of the regenerative properties of the plant; he is invaluable, they all are, and Sherlock is not so proud as to refute that fact, not now.

Not anymore.

He’s watching their descent from the deck outside the transporter room, watching the atmosphere swirl as continents emerge from the blue. It’s breathtaking, but his breath’s kept somewhere else, in other lungs, in another time with something, someone more vital than air.

“They’re ready for you.” Sherlock heard the approach—McCoy—but it’s all trivial. It’ll all be over soon.

“I suspect you’re rather anxious to be rid of me, Doctor.” Sherlock watches his reflection in the glass, watches the blue of his uniform highlight the deep oceans coming closer, yawning wide.

“You’re asking us to risk everything,” McCoy begins, but this is the end, and Sherlock’s had enough of skirting the obvious, his energy is spent.

“Him.”

McCoy blinks, his brow furrows. “Excuse me?”

“I’m asking the man you love to risk everything,” Sherlock declares, dispassionate, because significance is relative and it’s not, this isn’t. “I’m asking him to risk his life, his crew, his reputation. That’s what bothers you, is it not?”

McCoy’s approach is silent, but Sherlock watches it, mirrored until he is close, until he inserts himself between Sherlock on the approaching sky and leans close, his breath heavy, his eyes sharp.

“Listen here, Will fucking Robinson,” he spits, violent. “I don’t give a shit what your story is, and I don’t know that I believe your alibi for all the bodies you left in your wake,” Sherlock watches his cheek twitch, his pupils dilate with suppressed rage. “But you’re asking _us_ , this ship, this team,” McCoy swallows, his Adam’s apple ripples, and there’s something in it, something unexpected and fully anticipated that clenches in Sherlock’s stomach and makes him want nothing more than John’s warmth against his skin. “You’re asking my _family_ to go up against the unknown for you, to risk everything we have, everything we _are_ , and we don’t know your ass from Adam.”

McCoy backs away, and Sherlock feels the both of them deflate, somehow, mitigated across the distance. “I think it’s fairly damn reasonable for me to want to know why.”

Sherlock runs through a thousands lies before he settles on the truths buried below, acid. Razing.

“There is a moment,” Sherlock confesses, slowly; Sherlock closes his eyes and sees the blue in John’s when the world blends to black. “There is a moment in which you think you’ve lost everything that matters, when the world stops, and the muscles in your chest seize even as the blood pools inside your ribs,” and when McCoy sucks in air with a gasp, it’s involuntary; when Sherlock’s eyes sting, it’s expected. “Where you exist suspended outside of time, where you know that you will crumble and yet it won’t matter, because all that matters is already gone.”

“It is perhaps the most terrifying sensation I’ve ever experienced,” Sherlock admits in low tones, all weakness and regret. “Your heart pounds, ripples through the haze and it fights because it thinks that it’s strong enough, thinks the metaphors are meaningful and the force of feeling looms salvific, even as you start to feel faint.”

Sherlock has to swallow too many times, and his throat is raw before more words fit through the tightness, the fear.

“I have been suspended above that abyss since he fell in my arms,” Sherlock forces out, hoarse. “Since his heart gave out and I sold my soul for borrowed time,” and Sherlock turns, then, looks the doctor square in the eye and bares himself wholly, because there is nothing left to lose that isn’t John, and for John, he’ll give the rest, for whatever it’s worth, for whatever fraction of John it will save.

“I will borrow your time for him, Doctor McCoy,” Sherlock states plainly, not a threat, just a fact. “I will borrow, I will steal, I will tear this world to shreds if it could buy him a breath.”

Sherlock lets his eyes run over McCoy’s features, his posture, the set of his shoulders and the line of his spine. “And I think you know what that feels like.” McCoy blinks, and Sherlock’s deductions of his thoughts, his mind are partial at best: hypotheses, nothing more, and yet: “I think you understand me better than you deign to admit.”

There’s a quiet that settles, viscous and cold, and then McCoy fishes in the pocket of his trousers, extracting a small metal chip. He reaches out without preamble to the communications device attached to Sherlock’s shirt.

“It’s a toy Jim likes to keep under wraps,” McCoy tells him as he affixes it to the back of the comm; “but when it’s finished, this will lock your signal quicker than any transporter chief.” McCoy steps back, nods, and looks Sherlock in the eye as he warns, dryly: “Just don’t tell Scotty, yeah?” 

Sherlock watches the doctor’s retreat in the glass as the black of space disappears and there are mountains, forests, cities.

Sherlock breathes, the air is thin, and he closes his eyes one last time before he follows, before he surrenders, before he fights to the breaking. 

Sherlock breathes freely just one more time before the fall.

 

_______________________________________________

It’s anticlimactic, when the command is given, when Kirk calls out _Energize_ and he feels his body start to shift.

What comes as a surprise, is the way that the ground he begins to materialise upon proves unstable: simple pavement, and he can see the Gherkin, and yet his feet find no purchase, he flounders.

Sherlock doesn’t jump this time, can’t.

All that’s left for Sherlock Holmes is the fall, the impact.

The ground gives way and he follows.

_______________________________________________

Landing is utterly painless, and maybe that’s a clue.

The stench of rubbing alcohol and the glare of white, however, ensures he doesn’t dwell.

“John,” Sherlock exhales, and oh, oh, but John is so small, so colourless, so withered: there is nothing of his John in this figure, this crumpled heap of wrinkled flesh trembling, gasping; the monitors, the tubes and wires have all been removed, and the part of Sherlock that knows the heart of the unknown soul before him, fleeing swiftly, acknowledges what that means before his mind can refuse to comprehend; sends his heart wringing beneath the ribs.

“John,” Sherlock rasps, and it’s almost, it’s _almost_ as shaken, as treacherous as John’s shivering breaths, as that death rattle that lances through Sherlock straight through to the core of him, to the centre and through and he’s at John’s side, and John’s hand is limp, already lost in both his own as he wrestles down not a sob, no, but a scream, an unending cry to the layers of the earth and the worlds beyond the atmosphere and all the useless hate that dwells beyond his vision; all the wasted feeling trapped and writhing, now, inside his chest.

“Look at me,” Sherlock urges, one hand going to John’s cheek, papery, thin, cold, oh god, he’s cold. “Breathe, John,” and John’s eyes are slits and he’s trembling, he’s scrambling in his head for the way that half-masted gaze is wavering except his body’s surrendered and Sherlock touches him, begs it to give one last try, begs John to stay, to return and _fight_ , damnit.

Sherlock _begs_.

“Please, calm down, look at me,” but John can do neither, John is beyond hearing and knowing and exerting any will.

“Inhale,” Sherlock lays a hand on John’s chest and tries to gauge whether there’s any air flowing, whether there’s anything but thrashing and the last throes before the end. “ _Inhale_ John,” he tries, commands, but there’s no soldier, and that’s tragic.

There’s no lover, and that’s lethal.

“Someone help!” Sherlock chokes, screeches at whatever lies beyond the door to this room, this tomb, but it’s for naught, it’s useless, pointless, and it matters very little when John’s chest inflates and all the discordant shaking halts and there’s nothing.

Nothing.

“John, no,” Sherlock pleased, his voice hoarse and his chest caving. “John, John,” he runs frantic hands over John’s face, his neck: still, no motion, no pulse, no flush of the living, and Sherlock’s heart gives for a moment, demands release from a contract it signed without consent to be with John forever, to stay with John until the world collapsed on itself and enfolded them, side by side into the same ash, the same soil, the same breath on the wind.

He thinks, he knows there would be tears if there was anything in him, if everything he knows and is and could have been beside the person, the beloved man who’s left him—if there was anything that remained in his body, of his soul, then there would have been tears.

“ _John_.” 

There is time, meaningless. There is a spasming against his sternum that seems vicious, that seems fatal, and it’s welcomed.

There are footsteps. Sherlock doesn’t care to look up at them until their owner speaks.

“Perfect.” 

Everything stops.

That word, that voice: he speaks, the snake, the ruiner speaks and oh, Sherlock can feel the fire rising in him: not a burning, not an aching but scorched earth and ruin: his heart is dead and the flames are clawing and when he looks up to see him, to make him real, present, vile: Moriarty, _Moriarty_ is grinning like the sun’s risen after all the nights, as if there is no death, nothing broken or lost around them.

Sherlock will wrap his hands around that neck, twist the sinew in his palms; he’ll snap it with his hands and he will feel nothing, but the grinning will cease.

He hopes.

“Oh, that was _perfect_ ,” Moriarty preens, gushes, nearly bounces on the balls of his feet with genuine glee and Sherlock clenches his fists as he swallows bile and fights the interminable sting beneath his lashes, the shaking that starts in his marrow and spills out. 

Moriarty dances across to where Sherlock sits next to John’s still body, and Sherlock’s chest feel small and cavernous, hateful and hollow and hard. Sherlock feels something in him crumble, break and fall away when Moriarty leans in, too close to Sherlock’s torn flesh, his flayed soul turning cold on the bed; when Moriarty bends and flicks at the tip of John’s nose like a child and cackles, and Sherlock’s heart is in his throat by the time he has his hand around Jim’s neck, ready to tighten, ready to squeeze.

“Computer,” Moriarty chokes out around Sherlock’s grasp, but he never stops smiling as he looks into Sherlock’s eyes and reads fear and hate and deadness there, Sherlock knows.

Sherlock knows what his eyes betray. “End program.”

John disappears; everything disappears, but it’s John that Sherlock notices before he sees that everything else is gone, as well. The walls, the ceiling, the ground beneath his feet—vanished, all of it, as his grip loosens and he stumbles back, and yet it had all taken flight when John had left him, really; when Sherlock had failed his lover, his partner, his friend. 

John fled this world, and he took all colour, all structure, all order, all logic with him.

Sherlock blinks at the empty blackness, the orange lines that define arbitrary boundaries.

He blinks at Jim Moriarty and his feel his lungs contract, his jaw clench as the man’s mouth opens, as his eyes twinkle and he leans in, mischievous, the puppet master watching his marionettes spin.

“Felt absolutely real, didn’t it?”

And Sherlock doesn’t understand, except, expect—

_No._

“Would you believe it,” Moriarty scuffs his shoes and stuff his hands in his pockets, familiar, taunting as he saunters closer, as Sherlock’s breath comes quick; “reverse engineering the black hole was the easy part?”

“This, though,” he gestures to the glowing stripes among the black as if presenting royalty, as if pointing out the crown jewels. “This was a labour of love if ever one lived and breathed.” And he stares at the nothingness, the emptiness, the room of light and shade as if it does live, as if it can breathe: as if it’s _loved_ beyond measure.

“You’re,” Sherlock hisses, croaks. “You’re insane.”

“Most likely,” Moriarty concedes, unbothered, still gazing upon his beloved, upon the ether and dark as if it is diamond and gold, passion and need. “But I’ve solved our problem, Sherlock.” Finally, his eyes shift back to Sherlock, wide, poisonous and lustful, aching for the game, but more, for the tease, the _hunt_. “The final problem.” He pauses, shrugs, and draws out slow. “Well,” he grins, hateful; “ _your_ final problem.”

Sherlock is dumbfounded; blindsided. Sherlock is broken and battered and adrift without his anchor.

Sherlock is lightheaded; isn’t sure that he can breathe.

His eyes slide closed, his mouth is dry: there is only John’s corpse, John’s still chest, John’s cold skin.

 _John_. 

“John will die.”

He hears it; his eyes snap open and Moriarty’s face is blank now, unforgiving, placid. Sherlock sucks in air, and his vision spins, dots black and bright in waves and when he breathes, it feels like ice melting, like drowning and falling into a white dwarf at warp speed.

“No.” The whisper of it is hardly a threat, wholly a plea, and Sherlock is broken, and battered.

Sherlock finds his legs unstable; Sherlock has nothing to grasp for when he falls to his knees.

“Oh, Sherlock,” Moriarty drawls, tuts, pitying. “Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock, darling, that was never up for debate.”

Moriarty crouches in front of him, distant enough to skirt his hand should it fix around his neck again, but Sherlock won’t. His arms feel weak, boneless. He feels lifeless down to his very veins. 

“You could have given him the beating heart right out of your chest,” Moriarty breathes, and Sherlock can feel it, smell peppermint and creme on the words as they fall; “it wouldn’t have made any difference.”

Sherlock feels a surge of something unimaginable, unidentifiable, like lead and iron and bitter disdain, sweet on his tongue as he spits, growls: “You led me here—”

“For the main event,” Moriarty cuts in, nods. “You ran a few errands for me along the way, kept people distracted from the spider in their midst,” he smirks, and the unknown raging in Sherlock’s mind, his blood, it peaks again, blurs his vision; “diamonds in the rough and all that.”

“I pay my debts, Sherlock Holmes,” Moriarty tells him, divulges in a confidence as he stands, straightens, paces and sneers as he revels in the words that follow; “and I’ve owed you for quite a while.”

“I will keep you here, until your Captain dies, the _real_ John Watson,” he lingers on the name, and Sherlock aches with the fact that he says it, that he _defiles_ , but he cannot deny that it’s starting to sink in, hope against all sorrow that there might still be a chance, that Sherlock’s heart leaps because it understands that John is out there, somewhere, still struggling, still striving and surviving and holding his oath and believing in Sherlock as no one every has, and no other ever could and Sherlock is nearly sick with the relief of it, heady enough to stifle the futility, the uselessness when he’s kept here, stuck in limbo.

“I will drop you through black holes that are merely black walls and you will watch every possible way your world can shatter,” Moriarty bites out at him, an insect, a fiend. “I will keep you here until he’s about to breathe his last, and then you will go back.”

There is matter still left within him, Sherlock realises as it bends, cracks; as the pieces rear up and make to exact revenge, make to fell the skies and turn back time and end all worlds, if that’s what it takes.

If that’s what John needs. 

“You will fall through one last rift in the fabric of space-time. You will go back, and you will watch, and that will be the end. You will crumble in the dark, and I will _burn_ the heart out of you as I promised,” Moriarty stares at it, brands that truth into the shards of Sherlock’s very selfhood and they almost relish it, those jagged edges; they almost call it holy as they rise and meld and solder into something unbreakable and without feeling, hardened and heavy so as to crush, to save what’s left of that fledgling heart, that secret soul.

“And I will stay here,” Moriarty’s demeanour shifts, lightens, and he looks young, innocent, hopeful: lovestruck. “My baby and I will have the most incredible adventures, ever onwards and up,” his voice turns melancholic as he breathes out, his eyes far away: “always new.” Moriarty swallows hard. “Never boring.”

Sherlock feels himself rising, standing, feels a force moving his wasted limbs and he sees his opening, the distraction. He charges at Moriarty and he knows, in that moment, that more death with fill this room, that he will kill.

He will slaughter without mercy, here and now.

He charges, darts, runs with all he is; he doesn’t expect the forcefield, the wall of energy that stops him, that cuts him off at throws him back and the shock softens the blow as he crumbles to the ground, thwarted, useless.

His heart rages against his lungs, his ribs, against air and gravity and the stars in every quadrant as he realises: he has failed.

“When it stops,” Moriarty straightens his uniform, pulls at the collar and shakes his head as if to clear it, glancing at Sherlock as if nothing has occurred; “you’ll know that it’s real, you see.” 

Sherlock’s breath comes harsh as he steadies himself again the floor; Moriarty stares, and this is torment. This is heartbreak. This is defeat.

“Until then, John Watson will die in front of you,” Moriarty whispers, a sharp sort of sing-song; “a hundred, a thousand, a _million_ times over.”

His smile now spreads slow, and the snake tongues quiet, pierces lethal: “However long it _takes_.”

Sherlock finds himself dazed again, lack of oxygen and the betrayal in his pulse conspiring against him, and everything is darkening, darkening, as he hears footsteps retreat, a single word:

“Ciao.”


	8. Unto Death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, my thanks to [sangueuk](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sangueuk) for taking this babble and making it better.

It happens in Sherlock’s arms.

He falls into the hospital room—familiar—to see John thrashing weakly, feeble; to hear him moaning, desperate, and Sherlock’s broken heart shifts so as to slice against the pieces as he crosses the distance and situates himself behind John, wraps his arms gently around John’s diminished frame and holds him close, lets his pulse beat hard and terrified against John’s spine as John shakes out a breath, a breath, and then half, and then half, and then less.

Less.

None.

Sherlock sobs against the stiff fabric, the harsh reality of the hospital gown, the cold shoulder beneath.

John is dead.

_________________________________________

 

“How sure?” 

Bones raises an eyebrow at the question, but Jim needs to hear the answer he knows is coming.

“We don’t know.”

“The properties of _Hibisceae Capella_ have been studied for decades,” Sulu cuts in, “we still don’t understand—”

“The cure has an estimated efficacy of 93.50697 percent according to our models,” Spock interjects, and Jim reads the strange tension at the corners of his eyes, the apprehension that’s so rare, and it’s that tension, that fear that makes Jim shake his head.

“We need better,” he states it, unquestionable, just as Chekov rushes into the lab.

“Captain!”

_________________________________________

 

It happens beneath Sherlock’s palms.

He can’t account for what overcomes him, overtakes him when he watches John gasping for air, watches the end descend as he comes to himself, into his surroundings; he can’t explain the way his heart drops and his boots skid as he takes to John’s body as it stills. Sherlock tries his damnedest to bring it back, to salvage it from oblivion, to coax the heart into beating and the lungs into filling and the blood into pumping with his hands, his hands, his hands and then the lips, again and again until frail bones crack under the pressure and Sherlock’s own respiration becomes hysterical, his own consciousness begin to blur and yet, as he falls one more time, he could swear, he could _swear it_ —

He hears the pitch of it; laughter.

_I owe you a fall._

_________________________________________

 

The doors can’t open quite quick enough from the turbolift as Jim breaks onto the Bridge, Bones and Spock close on his heels.

“Uhura, what’s going on,” Jim asks her, and she’s ready for him.

“We’ve cracked Moriarty’s signal encryptions,” she tells him, her voice strained, just this side of despairing. “He is holding open a black hole, we don’t know how,” she blinks, shakes her head, and Jim feels his stomach tighten, feels the bottom falling out. “It’s small, but it’s unstable, it won’t stay open for long.”

Jim feels the adrenaline flooding his system as she adds:

“I think he knows that it doesn’t _need_ to stay open for long,”

The silence stretches for an instant as Jim realizes, as Jim understands that John Watson teeters on a brink—a brink that’s growing thinner by the breath; the silence stretches before Jim breaks it, whispers: “Shit.”

There is a moment before he moves, before he retraces his steps and makes to end this, but Bones has a hand on his sleeve before he can take three steps, stops him mid-stride.

“You’re not going,” Bones tells him, flat and final; Jim moves to wrench free from the grasp, furious and desperate and ready to pull rank as the images of a dying John merge with a dying Bones and he can hear the emptiness of Bones’ silent chest, so still; has to swallow bile before Bones slides his palms onto Jim’s shoulders and looks him square in the eye: resolved, but not denying. 

Open; sympathetic.

“If anyone’s going to a man’s deathbed,” Bones tells him, tone deep and low; “it’s going to be a goddamn doctor.”

There is a part of Jim that wants to argue, wants to take the risk upon himself—it’s a black hole, for fuck’s sake, they could lose everything, Bones could never come back, Jim would be broken, and yet it makes sense. It makes sense, but in the moment Jim can’t quite separate fact from fiction, now from then, and Bones is dying somewhere else, somewhere Jim can’t reach, and it hurts.

It _hurts_.

“You’ll take the tracker,” Jim tells him, voice tight.

“No, I won’t,” Bones shakes his head, a rueful smirk curving his lips as he shrugs off Jim’s harsh glare. “I gave it to His Royal Cockiness before he took off.”

Jim stops, pauses, the past and present divide for a moment as the instant they inhabit stills, and Jim studies Bones’ face for clues, but he can’t read them.

“What changed your mind?”

Bones looks down before meeting Jim’s eyes again, just a tad sheepish. “Not that your ego needs the stroking,” Bones grinds out, but its fond; “but I did exactly what you told me.”

Bones reaches, then, to cup Jim’s face and they’re on the Bridge, this isn’t meant for here, and yet, it is. It always was.

“I thought about you,” Bones whispers, his voice heavy with meanings there aren’t words to fill as he strokes Jim’s jawbone, soft and steady and sure. “What if it had been you, Jim?”

Jim shivers as Bones heaves a heavy sigh. “We can’t let John Watson die without giving this all we’ve got,” Bones tells him, agrees and consents and volunteers and affirms everything that Jim’s known in the blood of him, the heart of him from that first moment in that shuttle, those eyes and that voice, the spirit and the soul.

Jim nods.

“Ninety-three percent?” he asks, hopeful and resigned, because there’s no time for better, not now.

“Point five zero six nine seven, yes,” Spock adds, stepping forward as he addresses Bones; “but I cannot allow you to go alone, Doctor.”

“Spock?” Uhura asks, confused, before Jim or Bones has a chance; Spock steps toward his mate and grasps her upper arm as he draws her near.

“He is right, Nyota,” Spock murmurs. “A bond of that strength cannot be abandoned without cause.”

There’s meaning there, too, between them. Like Jim, she nods.

“Come on, Commander,” Bones beckons to Spock gruffly, giving Jim one last look before walking toward the lift; “Let’s make Scotty earn his keep.”

_________________________________________

 

It happens with John’s hand held in his.

John’s hand doesn’t grasp his, but it holds its own weight as Sherlock strokes the moveable skin, as he traces John’s knuckles and murmurs nonsense, tells bits and pieces of the story of their life together, of the way Sherlock could etch John’s scar from memory, the way John loves the taste of Sherlock’s sweat after sex, the way Sherlock secretly revels in the fact that John can—no, no; _could_ —lift him, fuck him against the wall and ease him down, steady, and make him feel so very loved. 

Sherlock feels the floor give way just as John’s hand goes limp; not quick enough as he chokes a sob, feel something central to his very being start to wither, start to wilt. 

_________________________________________

“ _Through_ the black hole?” Scotty’s eyes bulge a bit as he asks it, just this side of disbelieving—he’s been aboard the Enterprise too long to flat out reject the request as absurd.

Jim nods. “Can you do it?”

“Course I can,” Scotty scoffs; “but why would I _want_ to?”

Jim doesn’t bother to answer that particular question.

“Just make sure that you keep an eye on them,” he tells the Transporter crew as Spock and Bones step up to the pads.

“We’ve got them fixed up with that new tracker from Command?” Scotty asks, but Jim shakes his head, sending a half-hearted glare at his partner.

“Bones loaned mine out.”

Scotty laughs darkly. “You think I gave you the only one? Honestly?” He pulls a face at the captain, and this time, there _is_ disbelief. “ _You_?”

Jim looks doubly offended when Bones starts chuckling from behind him, when Spock lowers his gaze in a clear attempt to stave off emotion.

Scotty shakes his head, rolling his eyes as he commands the lieutenant at the controls. “Vatican Cameos on both of ‘em.”

“We’ll watch stability of the singularity from our end,” Scotty vows as Spock and Bones are equipped with the tech; “but I understand we’re dealing with a madman, yeah? I’d make this a rush job if you can.”

Jim holds Bones’ gaze for a second longer than necessary, so many seconds too short, before Spock gives the command.

“Energize.”

_________________________________________

It happens against Sherlock’s cheek, pressed to his ear.

“Do you remember that weekend in Essex?”

“Ffff...” John tries to answer; “Fffff...” and Sherlock knows it’s soon now, very soon because John’s lungs are rattling where he rests against John’s chest; John’s heart is slow, languid. 

It will be very soon. 

“Finchingfield,” Sherlock agrees, drawing idle patterns on John’s torso, relishing the way it still rises, despite the effort it takes. “Do you remember when you insisted that we watch the sunset?”

John struggles for breath for a moment, and Sherlock makes sure to put the barest pressure only against John’s body; just enough contact to _touch_. “Bor,” John stars, and Sherlock understands.

“It wasn’t boring. I know that’s why I said we shouldn’t,” he confesses, “but I was afraid.”

John’s hand paws, ineffectual and uncoordinated against Sherlock’s hair; falls, exhausted, the muscles tired and beyond Johns’ control, but Sherlock gathers it in his own grasp and holds it, brings the palm to his lips.

“We’d been,” Sherlock swallows, kisses John’s hand again. "Things had been changing, between you and I,” and if a tear falls from his cheek to John’s fingers, Sherlock doesn’t care, can’t possibly care, not now; “I was scared.”

“Lo,” John starts, coughs, and Sherlock tries to soothe him, to persuade him to stop trying to speak when it hurts, when it will only bring the end quicker, but John won’t have it, seems to steel himself for what it will cost to say the word: “love.”

And that’s it, really. That’s always been it.

“I knew I’d tell you, if we sat there, if I watched you instead of the horizon and simply sat with the overwhelming feeling that comes with your presence, your breathing, your voice,” Sherlock tells him, lacing together their fingers as he listens to John’s heartbeat under his ear, slower, slower, and oh, no, not this: “I was afraid of what might happen when I did.”

John moans, but it feels like an answer, rather than some pain.

“I love you,” Sherlock whispers; “I love you so much, John.”

“Thank you,” he breathes out into John’s skin; “for never once letting me fear what follows those words after that night, that first time.”

Sherlock settles again, and he thinks his own heart knows it before his mind understands, because it hurts to breathe before Sherlock realises that John isn’t. He listens for John’s heartbeat, but it’s gone, fled; there’s only Sherlock’s own mournful pulse. 

“John?” he chokes out, looks up, and he knows it’s over.

He closes his eyes, and waits for the pull, the tug of another round, another end, but it doesn’t come; for many long moments, it doesn’t come, and he feels a fracturing in his bones, feels the septum tear his atria apart as he starts to choke on half-formed sobs, and he’s almost lost, he’s almost gone when the ground falls out and he falls again.

He falls.  
_________________________________________

They materialize at the bedside of an elderly man, but Spock knows his face, recognizes its lines and shape from memories not his own.

“Captain Watson.” 

The figure on the bed doesn’t stir, doesn’t respond; McCoy’s eyes flicker to the monitors, take in all they can before he curses low:

“Goddamnit,” McCoy hisses as he reaches for the appropriate hypospray for the xenopolycythemia inoculation, his lips thinning when he sees no response, not a twitch from his patient as he administers the cure.

As McCoy moves to ready the second treatment, everything goes to hell.  

“Doctor,” Spock interrupts, and McCoy takes note of the urgency in that clipped tone, looks up: see the swirling vortex begin to take shape, slowly expanding in the corner of the room and the floor shudder beneath them.

“Fuck,” McCoy breathes,his grip tight on the first of the series of hyposprays they’d managed to synthesize from the Capellan flowers. “We don’t have the time here,” he glances again at the monitors, takes a moment to glance at John’s chart, sees the extent of the damage to his system, his organs; draws in a sharp breath; “or the tools.”

The black hole begins to yawn, and the floor shifts again, violent as the monitors begin wailing. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” McCoy swears again, glancing toward the EKG, “he’s crashing.”

“We have to beam him,” Spock announces, watching the hole as it stabilizes, as a door between places and times begins to manifest and they see a silhouette, ready to watch as hearts are broken and loves are lost.

“We’ve only got two trackers,” McCoy reminds the Vulcan, but Spock merely gathers close to the bed, attaches the tracking device to John Watson’s seizing body, and lifts the man’s feeble frame into his arms.

“Spock,” McCoy warns, taken aback; with the trackers, it’s a gamble they’ll make it back through. Without them—

“I have faith in Mr. Scott’s ability to improvise,” Spock declares, activating the trackers and signaling the transporter room.

The last thing they see is a sneering face taken aback, satisfaction morphing to shock, and then to rage as they dematerialize, as everything fades.  
_________________________________________

 

“Scotty,” Jim urges, this side of frantic, “you’ve got to get them out.”

“I’m working on it, Captain,” Scotty bites back, punching commands into the system with ineffable speed.

“Not just Spock and Bones,” Jim reminds him, watching the third trace from inside London start to lose signal, start to flicker and shift due to an interference that could only mean one thing: another black hole was opening, and Sherlock was about to fall to his doom.

“And their stowaway!” Scotty shouts indignantly, trying to lock on to the trackers, to lock onto Spock by proximity.

“Sherlock,” Jim interjects, “beam him out.” 

“Four targets, two locations, crumbling reality,” Scotty mumbles, still working as fast as his fingers will allow, barking orders to his transporter team at random intervals; “you don’t ask for much, do you?”

But there is something unnamable, undefinable, vibrating in Jim’s chest, searing in his throat and threatening to choke him, a fist around his heart as it pounds, threatening to squeeze and there’s no time, there’s no _time_ and for reasons he can’t quite know, he is sure that it’ll be his heart that breaks, here, in trying to save someone else from that same fate.

“Now, Scotty!”

Jim watches the signals lock and shift, lock and shift, get lost and reoriented, and he can’t breathe.

He closes his eyes, hears Scotty yell “Locked!”

And Jim Kirk does something he hasn’t done since those months at Bones’ side, watching him crumble and fade.

Jim Kirk closes his eyes, breathes in deep, and prays.


	9. Coming Correct

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, my thanks to [sangueuk](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sangueuk) <3

There’s a feeling, a certain intangible resonance that all hospitals have, all places of hurting and healing, saving and loss.

John Watson wakes in a place that neither smells, nor sounds like a hospital.

And yet, he knows.

There are sounds, sounds that feel familiar, that hum at a frequency that reminds him of home and makes his heart pump slow and steady, bolstered by the familiar pitch of the noise that bleeds at first, merges into nonsense before it starts to form gaps, sentences syllables; before the noise becomes words and the words belong to a voice.

John’s heart jumps, stumbles; he bites his lip, fearful of the sensation in his chest because the end is close, has been close and that’s not a good sign, that leaping about can can bring nothing but loss for his ravaged body on the brink of oblivion—save that something’s changed.

Something is different.

Sherlock is here.

“I assume it was the curls,” that low baritone murmurs. “He tasted like tequila, and you know how I hate tequila,” Sherlock chuckles softly. “He called me by a woman’s name, not his ex-wife, I assume his first girlfriend, based on the vocal register in which the word came out.”

Sherlock’s hand is in his, John realises; he realises that Sherlock’s thumb is stroking over his knuckles only when the motion stops, when Sherlock’s breath catches and John wants nothing more than to grip back except he can’t, he hasn’t been able to: his fingers so feeble, the joints stiff and sore. 

“I don’t think I ever told you that story,” Sherlock whispers, pauses, seems to ponder before he lifts John’s hand to his mouth and kisses the skin, and John fights a wince as he thinks of how ancient they must look, the bulging veins, the greying flesh—cragged, withered.

“I don’t know why I never told you,” Sherlock breathes out, and the sound is pure sorrow, all regret, and it catches in John’s lungs, the chambers of his tired heart and it’s then that it makes any sense, 

“You’d have laughed,” Sherlock laments, and his thumb starts moving against John’s knuckles again as John realises, John sees.

His breath hitches; there’s breath in him deep enough to hitch.

His pulse catches, but it’s steady, strong.

It hasn’t been steady, or strong, in _months_.

John inhales long and slow, careful through his nose, doesn’t dare to hope as he swallows once, twice, prays that his vocal cords remember a voice that sounds something like his own, that doesn’t come out just shy of a death rattle.

_Please_.

“You did tell me,” John forces out, thready and low but there, and so very _him_ that he thinks maybe it’s a dream, maybe this is death, maybe—

But oh, then Sherlock’s hand tightens around his own.

“John,” and that voice—that voice that sings in John’s blood and means not just home but solace: Sherlock’s voice marvels, it wavers, it hinges on a sob and his fingertips tremble, his body shifts to accommodate the speed of his breaths.

And John, he clutches back, and somehow his fingers rise to the challenge, grasping slow to Sherlock’s hand, touching soft to Sherlock’s bounding pulse at the wrist and how John has _missed_ this, more than words could ever touch.

“You were drunk,” John exhales, his throat sore but no more than any long night before a hard morning. “The Yard’s Christmas party,” John remembers, feels his lips curl as he sinks into the way his brain moves so quickly, so reliable: all the hazy recollections that had been lost in his illness are suddenly crisp again, colourful. His lips, shivering and feeble before, are now sure when they form the words that he wants to, _needs_ to say. “The one where I convinced you the vodka was diluted with tonic water,” John snarks, and dear lord, he feels giddy with it, with the energy of it and the way Sherlock laughs, almost hysterical, shocked and thrilled and brimming with something unutterable, unnamed.

“I knew it wasn’t,” Sherlock tells him, frantic and joyous and breathless with it. “I was hoping you’d take advantage of me when we got home.”

John giggles, and god, that feels beautiful—it feels beautiful because it’s cool and rough in his throat, his lungs; it feels beautiful because he remembers Sherlock’s liquor-loosened body pressed hot and pliant against his own.

“I think we can call that night a win on the whole,” John smiles, and he needs this to be real, he needs this to be true; he’s not ready to open his eyes yet, just in case, but he wants to see Sherlock, wants to take in that face and watch it move, feel those eyes and know their colour with perfect clarity. 

“The morning after,” he hedges, masks the bud of anxiety threatening to burst in his ribs with a bit of sarcasm, a bit of truth: Sherlock had been in agony the whole following day.

“Mmmm,” Sherlock hums, and John’s pulse jumps when lips press against his jawline; “worth it.”

God, yes.

God, _please_.

“Open your eyes for me, John.”

Of course Sherlock sees it. Of course he understands what lives beneath John’s skin, what cuts him at the core.

“Sherlock,” John starts, swallows, breathes. “Sherlock, I don’t—”

“Shh,” and Sherlock frames his face with steady hands, leans in to kiss John’s forehead and speak against his skin. “Your vitals are strong,” Sherlock says, his lips moving to John’s temple. “How are you feeling?”

“You,” John’s voice shakes, but he thinks about the question, contemplates his answer in light of the way his body seems abuzz with life, suddenly; seems to recall all that it was and can be once more, maybe, if he wills it hard enough. 

“I don’t hurt,” John shudders as he exhales; “breathing doesn’t hurt.”

Sherlock is close, so very close, and John wants to see him, John wants him to be solid, needs this to not be in his mind like all the times before, all the fantasies and desperate grasps at what could have been that he ran through in his mind for so very long, helpless, fruitless; alone.

Sherlock rubs his cheek against John’s and John reaches, aches to touch the scrape of stubble on Sherlock’s face, so rare, and yet something John has always adored, the rugged rasp when they press close. Sherlock follows his touch, moves to lace their fingers together and John lets him, curls his own around Sherlock’s hand and it takes a moment to sink in, truly, to register with wonder.

“I can grasp your hand,” John exhales, thinks on the way the flesh feels tight against the muscles, the tendons, the bone—youthful, at least by comparison, at least when held up against what was. “My skin...”

“Look at me, John,” Sherlock coaxes, “please. Let me see you.”

Sherlock sounds calm, his voice soft, but John knows his partner, John’s held that heart close enough to hear the need, the longing, the hurt and the fear and the desperation that seeps through.

He sucks in a breath, fights the pull of his lashes where they catch, where they stick, and he blinks.

The world is bright. His lover is near.

John breathes.

“I can see you,” John whispers, marvels, pulls Sherlock closer as his vision sharpens, as he focuses, as the sky-soaked mercury of Sherlock’s eyes gleams full, bright. “It’s clear,” and yes, clear where he’d been blinded, cataract-film across his vision like a glaze.

John leans in, lips against Sherlock’s as he mouths: “You’re here.”

Sherlock’s entire body shakes as he breathes out, “ _John_ ,” and then Sherlock’s mouth is locked to his, and John’s breathing him, and this is the dying John aches for and embraces, so different from the dying that had come upon him, that had receded once more, has left him, has been fought back and slain and John will feel the sun again, John will make love to Sherlock Holmes again, he will fall asleep on the chest of the man he adores, and he is grateful.

He is so fucking _grateful_.

“You did it,” John whispers between kisses, and he shouldn’t be surprised, and maybe he’s not, it’s just, he’d just; “I didn’t doubt you,” John vows before Sherlock’s tongue licks once more into his mouth; “I just—”

And Sherlock won’t have it, Sherlock won’t let him speak, not yet, because he sucks hard on John’s lower lip, tongues along John’s teeth until John moans, his vocal cords remembering _that_ sound quite well, indeed.

John doesn’t mind waiting, doesn’t mind the words pushed aside, because his lungs, as he gasps; the feeling of Sherlock’s breath against his skin as they hold to one another and steady, still in tandem: it’s all perfect.

He’s dizzy not with malaise, or the failing of his heart, the straining of his lungs. He’s dizzy with the _rush_ of it, and fuck, he has missed this in ways he’d never dreamed.

“To be honest, I didn’t think either of us would make it back,” John whispers once his breathing slows, and Sherlock just looks at him, sees into him and John had almost forgotten how it felt to be seen entirely, every detail and secret crevice: to be seen by eyes that shine out so much _love_. He’d almost forgotten.

But not quite.

“How?”

Sherlock smiles, real happiness tangled up in a kind of disbelief that excites John more than it sets him on edge, because that’s who they are, that’s how they work: that’s how it’s meant to be, always. 

“Oh, John,” Sherlock shakes his head as he grins all the wider, gaze gleaming: “of all the uncanny things we’ve seen, this may be the most ineffable.”

John takes a moment to look around them, to see and observe beyond the immediate necessity of Sherlock’s presence, Sherlock’s touch. He gasps at the pristine white, the flashing lights, something out of science fiction; he glances at the bed he’s propped in, feels his brow quirk of its own volition as he tries to make sense of it, familiar and yet strange all at once.

_Brilliant_.

John lips curl to match Sherlock’s expression, to mirror that manic delight. “I get the impression I’ll be laid up here for a spell,” John tells him, sits up and relishes the way that it’s easy; the way that he aches for his actual age, the way his bones crack with relief when he stretches, because he _can_. “Go on, then, love,” he urges; “Try me.”

Because once again, against all odds, they have the time.

______________________________________________________

“Was it like that?”

Jim starts, the words catching him off guard as they whisper into the shell of his ear. He turns, sees Bones hovering close, feels the heat of his body now as he leans in, looks over Jim’s shoulder at the reunited couple, at a John Watson in an unthinkable second-prime of life—the damage to his system reversed, his ailments healed—smiling broadly at his lover: a Sherlock Holmes that’s barely recognizable for the relief that loosens his muscles, for the joy that brims from every pore of him.

“Like what?” Jim asks, voice pitched low; he doesn’t want to be seen, doesn’t want to interrupt the way Sherlock is relating his unthinkable journey through time and space; doesn’t want to shortchange the gleam in John’s eyes as he takes in his partner, his lover, his friend, and relishes, feeds off the energy, lends it back in spades.

“Did it change you, when I,” Bones falters, averts his eyes before regrouping; “Was it like that?” He nods to the biobed where Sherlock’s seated just next to John, close, familiar and comfortable and desperate all at once, their hands folded together as if they don’t even know it, as if it’s the only logical way to be.

Intertwined.

“Yeah,” Jim breathes, confesses, reaching for his own lover’s hand, twisting Bones’ fingers against his own and grasping, holding.

“Yeah,” Jim says; “it was just like that.”

Jim can hear the way Bones’ breath hitches, and maybe he shouldn’t have said a goddamned thing.

But then Bones is leading him, wordless, walking him away from the medical bay, away from the world, past crew members and closed doors until they reach their quarters, until Jim hears the door slide closed behind them and Bones is everywhere within the space of a breath, his hands on Jim, his mouth against Jim’s skin, all half-formed apologies and promises and fuck, _fuck_ : Jim rises to the invitation to fall against this, Jim moves into Bones’ touches, the fit of his palm against Jim’s shoulders, the planes of his chest, the curve of his thighs. 

They fall against the bed without grace or finesse, but Bones takes advantage of the sprawl to stretch his body fully against Jim’s frame, undressing him with due haste before kissing straight down the middle of him, the stretch of his sternum a quivering faultline as Bones works lower, tongues at his heaving chest before moving up once more, sucking at Jim’s collarbone and keening up to swallow the moan that follows in a rough kiss as he reaches between them, takes them both in hand and rocks careful, practiced, intuitive so that his hips never falter, knowing Jim like the Georgian sunset or the beating of a heart so that when Jim breathes in, it’s Bones.

Just Bones, and it feels like every time death’s come for Jim, laced with every moment Bones’ eyes have opened to the day anew—t’s all that, electrified, when he peaks, when they tremble against each other and gasp like it’s new again, like they could get lost in this just as easily as they could crumble.

“I wanted to give up,” Bones pants against Jim’s shoulder. Jim’s fingernails dig into the sweat-slick skin as he holds Bones close, their chests angry, vicious as they heave at counterpoint, out of sync. 

“It hurt like nothing else,” Bones whispers, and Jim makes out the shape of the words where his mouth presses close, more than he hears any sound. “And when I felt the end coming, I wanted to grab hold of it and follow,” and they both breathe in sharp then, there, and their sternums align for an instant outside time in the grasping; “every time a bit more than the last.”

And Jim remembers it all too well, those moments where the breaths were shallow and the biobed was screeching, where every specialist Jim could muster was shaking their head and Jim’s eyes were raw and his ribs felt hollow—

Jim remembers.

“But you were there,” Bones tells him, kisses the line of his collarbone; “you were always there, and so I gritted my teeth and I fought the devil for you as best I could.”

“And when it was over,” he exhales, and Jim shivers: “I was exhausted, I was broken, and  you led me out of the dark,” Bones runs the bridge of his nose along the line of Jim’s throat as he breathes in, speaks: “You put me back together.”

Jim isn’t sure if he wants to sob, or scream, or come again, but he’s too stretched, too full, too fragile beneath the layers and there are enough layers to keep the world out, sure, but not Bones.

Not _Bones_.

“And then it was right again, and we were happy, and you stopped sleeping pressed against my chest because you had to, you came close because you wanted to,” and it’s true, but he hadn’t known that Bones’d picked up on it. 

“I didn’t want to think about it anymore,” Bones confesses. “I wanted to move forward,” he says, raising up on his palms to look Jim in the eye. 

“I failed you in that, Jim,” Bones says with all seriousness, all the regret and the hurt and the want in his eyes that Jim can fathom in this world, or any other.

“I failed you,” Bones whispers, leaning down to speak against Jim’s lips; “and I hope you’ll let me try to make that right.”

Jim slides a hand between their bodies, runs it flat from the jut of Bones’ hip to his suprasternal notch. “You’re healthy, and you’re here, and you’re mine,” Jim breathes. “That’s enough, Bones,” and it is.

“I _am_ yours,” Bones confirms, straight and plain. “I’ll always be yours, James Kirk,” he moves to kiss at Jim’s upper lip, tongues at the lower as he pulls away and considers Jim, solemn and brimming and _Christ_ ; “long after the day I die, I suspect,” and there’s a quirk to his lips, maybe a smile, maybe a frown: “The universe’ll remember I was yours, if she remembers anything at all.”

It’s shaky, unsteady when Jim breathes in, and it’s not surprising: he’s shaky, unsteady from the lungs out to the skin, but Bones is there, and he’s Jim’s, and his breath is warm like his chest when it rises into Jim’s chest in tandem, in time, and it really is enough, he thinks.

It really is enough.


	10. Into Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And yay, finished before the release. My deepest thanks to [sangueuk](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sangueuk) for beating this into shape, over and over again, and to [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad) for always encouraging me, even in my most foolish ideas—it is perhaps most appropriate that my former Bridge Crew loves helped me figure this thing out.

Spock enters sickbay long after beta shift ends; John Watson is sitting propped in his bed, reading a PADD held in one hand while the other strokes through Sherlock Holmes’ curls where the man’s head is pillowed next to Dr. Watson’s hip as he sleeps. 

“Couple hundred years,” John chuckles, acknowledging Spock’s presence without looking up; “and we still haven’t cured the common cold.”

“I understand that great strides have been made regarding that particular ailment,” Spock responds, stepping forward and taking in the intimate scene closer to the source: John’s vitals are strong, Sherlock is snoring slightly. Spock recognizes, vaguely, that he might be interrupting something quietly significant; he does not turn away. “But indeed: as yet, no cure.”

John’s smile fades as he looks up, meets Spock's eyes. “Sherlock tells me that he doesn’t know if you can get us back to our time.”

Spock nods. “That is correct.”

“Suppose I should start reading up, then,” John lifts the PADD indicatively. “Doesn’t seem much need for the kind of soldier I was, not here,” John glances around the medical bay with hope, and wonder, and strangely, with regret. “But there’s always need for a doctor.”

“That is true,” Spock agrees. “I cannot imagine that Doctor McCoy would object to your presence on his medical team, should you wish to remain on the _Enterprise_.” It’s not secret among the crew that McCoy has taken a keen liking to John Watson, not least for the man’s enviable skill at tempering the most willful of brilliant fools.

“There are, of course, many other ships you might serve on,” Spock adds, “once you’ve updated your expertise accordingly.”

“It’s funny,” John says without humor as he sets the PADD aside and goes back to stroking his partner’s hair, his eyes fixed on Sherlock’s head in his lap; “I can’t even bring myself to be all that bothered by the fact that I might never see home again.”

They let the silence reign for a moment, but it’s fleeting. There are things to be said; there is a reason Spock is here.

“You love him,” Spock observes, divested entirely from his knowledge of Sherlock’s feelings, based solely upon the silent adoration made plain in John’s gaze.

“More than breathing, boring as it is,” John smirks, and Spock feels as if there is more to that than he can extrapolate, a warmth and a reference that is beyond his frame of reference, and he stops searching for a context just as John’s voice drops and he exhales, low: “More than life itself.”

Spock blinks, considers saying nothing, excusing himself, but no.

“He feels similarly.”

“Hmm,” John hums, his fingers tangling at Sherlock’s nape; “does he now?”

“His memories were required—”

“Psychic voodoo,” John cuts in, his tone hard but not quite cold. “He mentioned it.”

“I did not wish to cause him undue distress,” Spock defends against the barb he can sense, but cannot quantify. “He offered his consent.”

“Probably thought you were winding him up, yeah?” John says it with a ruefulness that diffuses the threat of tension; with a fondness and a protectiveness that fit.

“He is bound to you inextricably,” Spock elaborates—these thoughts, this need to make known the things that were in that mind, that were held so close and cherished, feared unknown by their maker: Spock gives them a voice that is, perhaps, beyond his place, but he believes it necessary. Worthwhile, despite the costs.

That mind, that rather brilliant intellect: it had been _ablaze_ with unspoken feeling in a way that Spock had never seen.

“His selfhood is intermingled with yours,” Spock tells John, tries to give some of the passion he recalls, that he’s stored from that encounter in his own mind; tries to infuse his words with some degree of it, but like Sherlock himself, Spock falls short of the task. “His recollections of you, the associations you engender; they are uniquely profound.”

John looks at Spock like he can’t quite make sense of him, but that is not an unfamiliar reaction; Spock is quite accustomed to it. 

“Thanks,” John says slowly; “I think.”

“Do you doubt the strength of his sentiments?” Spock asks, uncharacteristically invested, somewhere between offended and concerned. He mulls for a moment over the ramifications of the offer he considers making before he commits: “I would require his explicit consent, but if you desired to engage in the Meld, I could—”

“Fuck, he was right,” John breathes out, and Spock feels his brow quirk in askance without his consent.

“Pardon me?”

“Thank you, for the offer,” John tells him, bemused; “but I don’t need to see what you’re wanting to show me,” and Spock is caught off guard, in that; Spock doesn’t understand.

“Your indication of skepticism regarding your partner’s devotion to you suggests otherwise,” Spock counters, dedicated to his goal: these two beings, they must _know_ what lies between them, and if Sherlock cannot speak it, Spock must—

“It wasn’t skepticism.” 

Spock pauses, his eyes shifting to pin John, to take him in and consider the whole of him, the relaxed posture of him as he leans into the incline of the biobed, the way his palm fits the curve of Sherlock’s skull just so. 

“You feel a certain kinship with Sherlock, don’t you?” John asks. Spock does not respond.

“He feels one with you,” John continues, undeterred. “He told me as much.” John considers his lover for a moment, stroking his thumb across Sherlock’s newly-tensed forehead until the lines smooth and he eases once more. “Thank you, for believing in him, by the way,” John adds, focusing again on Spock, who is unsure what the man means.

“I saw his thoughts,” Spock clarifies. One does not require belief, unfounded, when the facts are placed before them.

“But you believed the best from those thoughts,” John clarifies. “Not everyone would.”

“You thanked me for believing in him,” Spock pushes back, uncertain; curious; “not for helping to save you.”

“For that too, of course,” John nods before focusing again on Sherlock. “But he is my priority, you understand. He is my heart. If I am lost, and he lives on,” John breathes in heavily, and Spock glances at the biobed readouts—all within normal range; “If he is loved, or at least not loathed, for all the wonderful madness that he holds in him,” John stares at the man sleeping against him with a wonder that Spock doesn’t quite comprehend; “then that’s an even trade.”

“He would contest that estimation,” Spock states without hesitation, and John, inexplicably, laughs.

“He has,” John confirms, “many times.”

Spock watches the two men before him, analyzes their comfort, their strange asymmetry, their paradoxical fit, but falls short of a logical explanation, a level of understanding that he’s comfortable with. 

John nods, reading something in Spock’s countenance. “This is my everything,” John breathes, “here,” and he gestures to Sherlock’s sleeping frame as a given. “Of course I know how he loves me, Mr. Spock,” John tells him, simply. “He loves me like I love him, and there’s no language in the universe that can speak to that with any degree of truth, not a single one that can make sense of the way it feels to hold him, to breathe him in, to be the centre of his world for even a moment,” John breathes in deep, and Spock feels the shift in the room, in the gravity of the moment; “let alone the better part of all the days ahead.”

Spock finds himself oddly bereft in that moment; finds himself longing, unthinkably, for a hand that fits in his like Sherlock’s does in John’s.

“It doesn’t have to be said,” John tells him, and Spock recognizes that this is about more than just the here and now, more than these two men Spock barely knows; it’s about an insight Spock can’t justify and yet he can feel it, see it, sense it without question: precise. “In fact, oftentimes it shouldn’t be,” John tells him, assures him, speaks to questions Spock wasn’t sure he had until they’re answered before they’re asked. “Not when there aren’t any words that could ever measure up.”

Spock nods, and knows Nyota is off duty, this night.

“You should get some rest, Doctor,” Spock says softly, taking in the scene before him one more time as he makes to retreat.

“I’d suggest the same to you,” John tells him in parting as he settles back into the pillow at his neck and Sherlock moves, shifts to form closer against John’s body, his warmth: innate. “But something tells me you don’t need much sleep.”

Spock nods, the exchange acknowledged for all that it is and isn’t, and he allows himself one last glance at the peacefulness, the serenity bought for their efforts, and thinks, just before he takes his leave, that the needs of the few—the needs of just two, even, from time to time—might hold more sway than he’d previously supposed.

Sherlock shifts in his sleep, unsettled, until John bends at an unnatural angle to press lips to Sherlock’s brow, easing him back to quietude, and yes.

The needs of the few sometimes—inexplicably—hold the most weight.


End file.
